Fred Stonehouse Exhibition, Falling Waters, Reviewed in Shepherd Express

*To view the original article on the Shepherd Express website, please click HERE

Fred Stonehouse Evades Easy Categories

BY SHANE MCADAMS MAY 11, 2022

Fred Stonehouse PATCH, Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 60”

On an imaginary spectrum from pure abstraction to crisp representation, I often wonder which side possesses the edge in revealing the private realms of the artist. On one hand, an intuitive composition of formal marks is the deepest and most interior language imaginable, but on the other hand, it sometimes is too much of an interpretive inkblot. While objective subject matter tends to force the terms, it also has the potential to burrow into spaces with more specificity … even if the specificity leads back to uncertainty.

This is a rhetorical consideration, and the answer is “both,” and “it depends.” Nevertheless, it seemed a helpful framework to place in front of the work in Fred Stonehouse’s current exhibition, “Falling Waters,” at Tory Folliard Gallery on view through May 28. At least it did for me in the wake of a night of weird dreaming. Stonehouse’s work teems with detail and specificity. Its superficial resolution and directness almost seem to spurn any sort of abstract interpretation. Even the most uninitiated viewer would refrain from referring to any of his cast of tightly rendered objects and characters as “abstract.” Every piece of content is identifiable if not nameable. From a butterfly, a snake, a sparrow, and a frog in Lost Creek Falls, to a tiger and a trout in Catch, the viewer’s left brain doesn’t have to do too much work finding its bearings. However, where, say, a ‘50s era Willem de Kooning seduces viewers with abstract arrangements of color, and encourages more concrete language,, Stonehouse’s work goes in the opposite direction.

In his work Patch, which features a bear-headed human figure clutching a whole watermelon, and stoically peering and salivating at a nearby cobra coiled around its own half melon, we naturally want to piece together a narrative. Butterflies flutter behind the central action and a waterfall gurgles in the deeper background. Is this mythology, symbolism, surrealism, or confessional? Time with the work starts to tell us more, but also less.

With similar suggestiveness, Next presents a figure donning a skeleton costume with butterfly wings, holding a large pear. The centered and foregrounded figure cowers awkwardly against a theatrical moonlit ring of waterfalls. It’s a bizarre and eerie scenario, evoking the nightmarish Sissy Spacek prom queen scene in the film Carrie, with his tears of blood gathering his brow. Both are drenched in wet shame in an otherwise ideal setting. The theatricality of the painting is further advanced by its repurposed vintage frame which functions, as it does in others, as a high-relief proscenium. From stage to stage as it were, eccentric detail to eccentric detail, the psychic residue builds. Any progress toward clarity founders. One slowly stops reading the work and instead builds a vague picture of total interiority that gets consistently more dreamlike.

You know when you have a technicolor nightmare about your high school English teacher, dressed like Marie Antoinette, chasing you with a 5th edition copy of Norton’s Anthology of English Literature, around a pool, at night, that might have been your grandmother’s, but is bottomless and lava, that you describe to a good friend with all the detail that woke you sweating at 2 a.m. … and they’re left totally puzzled? You try to give them more details, but it doesn’t help. They only get bored. Of course, they’d get it if only they could trace your dream inventory into your limbic system with you. But alas they can’t. Given this, Fred Stonehouse’s paintings might be as close as one can get to inhabiting a single kaleidoscopic interior subconscious. Not in one work. Not in two, but across many, in a hiccupping chain of irrational interior reflections. Even though the content may be identifiable in Stonehouse’s paintings, it eventually coalesces into a cloud of general strangeness that leaves the images behind, to linger abstractly, like a fever dream … or an abstract painting in reverse.

Fred Stonehouse NEXT acrylic on wood, 48 x 24”

MOWA Exhibition of Marion Coffey Featured in Shepherd Express

*To read the original article on the Shepherd Express website, please click HERE

MOWA Exhibit Honoring Marion Coffey Long Overdue

BY MICHAEL MUCKIAN APR. 19, 2022

Milwaukee native Marion Coffey always planned to be an illustrator, artist and printmaker, and her sea of accomplishments is testament to her extensive talent, intellectual curiosity, and expressive nature. The one thing Coffey never accomplished during her lifetime was being honored with her own dedicated exhibition. The Museum of Wisconsin Art has, at long last, rectified that shortfall.

“Marion Coffey: The Art of Color,” which opens at the West Bend museum on May 7, is a showcase of vibrant colors, natural scenery, and visual chronicles of her travels to Europe and Africa. Coffey, who passed away in 2011 at age 87, once said, that she painted images “not exactly how they may look, but how I seem them.” Apparently, she saw everything with the same level of simplicity and high emotions with the same bright promises of a better world.

“She has a joyous expression in her work, and we haven’t had enough of that lately,” says MOWA Executive Director Laurie Winters, who curated the exhibition of 40 pieces by the late artist with the help of her daughter Lisa Coffey-Robbins. “This is her very first exhibition and my only regret is that this didn’t happen during her lifetime.”

Coffey was born to a single mother, Mary Kunzelmann, in Milwaukee in 1924, and shortly thereafter the pair moved to Chicago. Coffey’s mother was a salesperson, and as a little girl Marion would stay in the car while her mother made sales calls. Armed with a pad of paper, crayons and colored pencils, Marion entertained herself by drawing while her mother worked, laying the cornerstones of her artistic career. She went on to attend a variety of prestigious art schools, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fountainebleau School of Art, 40 miles southeast of Paris, France.

In the 1940s, Coffey went work at a major Chicago ad agency, one of the first women illustrators in the industry. The agency’s clients included Coca-Cola, Coppertone Suntan Lotion and RCA. Her advertising work was realistic and anecdotal, in distinct contrast with her later fine art, and she sometimes used her own image when it was appropriate. She also did illustrations for the Chicago Tribune and, after returning to Wisconsin to live with her mother in West Bend, for the Milwaukee Journal. In 1952, she married John Louis Coffey, who eventually went on to become Judge Jack Coffey, occupying the bench with the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Marion Coffey eventually abandoned commercial art for a more expressive form of fine art, much of it showing influences of both French Impressionism and German Expressionism, as well as that of American artist Milton Avery. She found inspiration in her plein-air paintings of the Wisconsin countryside and loved working with handmade paper, exhibiting her work at the Charles Allis Museum and other are galleries and venues.

“Marion Coffey worked very boldly, and that’s surprising,” Winters says. “She did things more tediously and laboriously because she was a perfectionist about color, and she knew how to make her colors come alive.”

Marion Coffey: The Art of Color runs May 7 through July 10 at The Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Avenue, West Bend. An opening reception will be held May 7 from 2 to 4 p.m. For more information, visit wisconsinart.org.

Paula Swaydan Grebel featured in Door County Pulse Magazine

To see the original article on the Door County Pulse website, please click HERE

Deliberate by Design: How Paula Swaydan Grebel navigates the artistic process

By Tom Groenfeldt, April 21st, 2022

Paula Swaydan Grebel approaches her painting very deliberately: sorting through images, making selections, doing small drawings and then making a sketch on paper — a sketch she may enlarge, shrink or cut apart to insert a new image in the middle. Only then does she begin to transfer the image to canvas in oil paint.

But she didn’t always work like this. In another lifetime, she describes a way of working that was very loose.

“I was trained to just go and do the work,” said Swaydan Grebel, who has a BFA from California State University–Long Beach. She and her husband, Randy, moved to Plymouth, Wisconsin, for work and bought a place in Egg Harbor about 18 years ago. They retired there full time two years ago.

Over the years, Swaydan Grebel continued her art education and credits Catherine Kehoe, a Massachusetts-based contemporary artist and painter, with helping her to organize, structure and gear her work toward her own temperament.

Before arranging her workflow to fit her way of working, “I found that I was always fixing the painting,” Swaydan Grebel said. “The design wasn’t right; the drawing wasn’t right; the color wasn’t right. A lot ended up in the trash. Kehoe had a process that connected with my personality. I think a lot. I’m methodical. I enjoy the designing portion.”

Instead of working piecemeal, Swaydan Grebel said she likes to see images in a group and then work on the design. That starts with thumbnail sketches, about two inches by two inches.

“These help me to understand the possibilities, to think past the image, and come up with a decent design,” she explained, adding that it can take weeks to create a drawing to transfer onto the canvas. 

Her latest bit of education comes from her family.

“We have a new grandson – our first – and when I see him look at the world, it’s so cool,” Swaydan Grebel said. “That’s how I want to see things: the way a child does when it is all new.”

With the drawing complete, she then decides which colors to use.
“In every painting, I try a different set of colors,” she said. “It’s been a good challenge.”
As an aid in remembering the color choices, Swaydan Grebel writes down the chosen colors in a book coordinated with the artwork.

“Finally, when I start painting, I will cover one section at a time. The middle of this process is when I want to wipe and correct. I resist this desire,” she said. “Once the canvas surface is covered from top to bottom, it becomes a painting. I love that part. It’s magical!”

Swaydan Grebel’s paintings are infused with color and show a strong sense of design, expressed in color and texture. She has a strong interest in artists throughout history, making references in conversation to Bonnard, Morandi, Bruegel, Albers, Cézanne and Philip Guston – quite a range.

Now she’s intent on creating a body of work that consists of paintings of interiors.

“The interiors have a bit of landscape because there’s usually a window, and usually they have at least one still life in them,” Swaydan Grebel said. “I find it fun, exciting.”

To make it challenging, she has given up her full-range palette with multiple variations of each color, settling on yellow, blue, red and white. 

Like many artists, she also seeks inspiration away from home. In the winter, she and Randy load up their Subaru Forester and head to California to visit family. The back of the car contains an easel, paint, turpentine and panels.

“My husband gets the back seat – well, I also take a little bit of that too,” Swaydan Grebel said. “Winter is a big chunk of my time; I can’t just not work” – especially this year, when she had a show at the Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee opening in March. In Door County, her work is shown at Cappaert Contemporary in Egg Harbor.

MPR: Art Hounds recommend art-based road trips in Minnesota featuring T.L. Solien

*To read the article and listen to the segment on the MPR website, please click HERE

Art Hounds recommend art-based road trips in Minnesota

Emily Bright

June 20, 2021

T.L. Solien, "Wasteland," 2011. Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 78 by 96 inches.Courtesy of Nemeth Art Center

T.L. Solien, "Wasteland," 2011. Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 78 by 96 inches.

Courtesy of Nemeth Art Center

Visual artists Lisa Bergh and Andrew Nordin of New London, Minn., recently took an art-themed road trip that included a stop at the Nemeth Art Center in Park Rapids, Minn. and the T. L. Solien exhibit “See the Sky.”

Solien’s large scale paintings captivated them. They described the drama of his contemporary work — its humor and pain and emotional charge — as well as his skill with color. “There's actually some subtle moments in some of the smaller pieces that I found myself kind of stuck on,” said Nordin, who was struck by Solien's use of the color yellow.

T.L. Solien, "The Renunciation 2," 2015. Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 72 by 96 inches.Courtesy of Nemeth Art Center

T.L. Solien, "The Renunciation 2," 2015. Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 72 by 96 inches.

Courtesy of Nemeth Art Center

“I always love going to the Nemeth Art Center,” added Bergh, “You enter into the space through the [Hubbard County] Historical Museum with tons of artifacts, which even made more sense when you walk [up the big stairs] into Solien’s work, because the show is just built on all these artifacts of his personal history of culture.”

T.L. Solien’s show runs through July 17, with a closing reception on July 10 at 4 p.m.

Paula Swaydan Grebel Featured in Interview with Zeuxis (An Association for Still Life Painters)

#To see the original article on the Zeuxis website, please click HERE

Organizing Sensation

An Interview with Paula Swaydan Grebel - Gwen Strahle - John Goodrich

by Franklin Einspruch

Paula Swaydan Grebel​ Table Setting​ 2018-20​​ oil on panel​ 36 x 24 in

Paula Swaydan Grebel​ Table Setting​ 2018-20​​ oil on panel​ 36 x 24 in


Paul Celan (trans. Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin):

​you, never-to-be-counted:

by one null-

token

you are ahead of

them all.

When I started writing criticism in the 1990s, the question was still hanging in the air of what period of art we were in, Pluralism having grown stale as a category. In the years following it became clear that the sheer number of artists and the proliferation of styles was such that an enterprising critic or curator could make a case for just about anything as an ascendant movement. Every so often an excitable critic dubs someone the finest artist of his or her generation, in derisive imitation of the one critic who got away with that in 1945. It never sticks. It won’t do to plug some novel phenomenon into the historical position occupied by High Modernism. We live in a different time, one that demands a more receptive critical approach, a willingness to look at all anew.

And what times they are. While some critics, the perpetual victims of historicism, are on the lookout for how artists are responding to the pandemic or the political events of the last year, I’m increasingly interested in the opposite, the artists who are able to bear down and work in spite of the mayhem going on in the world. Thus it was my honor and pleasure to interview three intensely committed painters, John Goodrich, Paula Swaydan Grebel, and Gwen Strahle, all of whom bring their distinct energies to the subject of still life.

Franklin Einspruch: Are you sensitive, personally or aesthetically, to the turning of the year? What sentiments does it generate, either in regards to New Year in general or this one in particular? Does it affect your painting or how you think about it?

John Goodrich: This year the thought of a vaccine on the horizon is a big boost! But generally, seasons don't change my frame of mind, beyond the fact that cold weather means I won't be painting outside. I enjoy painting whatever nature presents at the moment.

Paula Swaydan Grebel: With the turning of the year, I notice that the sky is darker at night, and the sun lowers during the afternoon. There are a lot of greys and browns. I miss the songbirds and all the unusual insects. I am aware of the quiet. Winter is when I travel west to visit with family. This interrupts my studio time, shakes things up, which has some benefits. I take in new views, ideas, and experiences. I will sketch and paint on the road and while visiting family. The key importance is to take the time to draw and paint. Creating art allows me to transcend to a better place. I am uncomfortable when I am not painting.

I paint year-round and never have big plans as the year ends. The quiet winter months are a good time to contemplate the experiences of 2020. It is also time for me to have a conversation with my paintings and set new goals for 2021 to keep me focused. I hope next year it is safer for all to return to some normalcy.

Paula Swaydan Grebel working in her studio

Paula Swaydan Grebel working in her studio

Gwen Strahle: It's going to be hard not to look back on 2020, and be ready for 2021. I can't say that I think too much about the new year in relation to my painting. I am usually entering into teaching a Drawing Marathon in January, at the Rhode Island School of Design. After five weeks, I have spring semester off, so I am geared up to have an uninterrupted time in my studio. I'm more focused on that turn, rather than the turning of the year. I am not teaching it this year as all Winter-session classes will be remote, so as of today I have steady time in the studio through February.

FE: Conventions, in my opinion, often get a bad rap. I've seen a lot of press releases singing the praises of some artist for defying conventions or nursing an unconventional approach. This seems to reinforce the myth of the artist as a professional flaunter of mores, for which there are examples, but they strike me as beside the point of why one would disdain a convention - it may be limiting, but limits can be productive. You've chosen the conventions of still life and figurative painting in general. What is your relationship with conventions?

JG: I'd agree that the art world too much resembles the fashion world in that sheer demonstrations of unconventionality seem to get the most attention. You could say that the convention of a painting having rectangular limits is actually what makes it most interesting – a painter can use these limits to give a sense of scale and momentum to whatever happens within the rectangle. At least that's what I get out of great painting, whether abstract or representational.

GS: I consider the still life not a convention but a vehicle. The still life gives me a freedom, in painting. So, it’s actually the opposite of limiting.

PSG: I do not think about any relationships with conventions while painting. The decisions I make about the work are intuitive. With that said, to be honest, art history matters in who I am as a painter. From years of study and painting, I am sure that what I have learned has internalized. The elements must feel right, the space, unity, movement, repetition, scale and proportion. Then there are times I'll push these ideas, place the object dead centre, then see how I can balance the picture. Cezanne's play with space and scale intrigues me. Right now I am attempting to alter conventional colors to see where it leads me. So, without thinking about it, I both follow and defy conventions.

Paula Swaydan Grebel​ Room with Artwork​ 2020​ oil on canvas board 12 x 9 in. photographed by LivingEtc

Paula Swaydan Grebel​ Room with Artwork​ 2020​ oil on canvas board 12 x 9 in.

photographed by LivingEtc

FE: A common theme I find among the three of you is an interest in taming complexity. You include objects like baskets, scalloped glass, and the like, and then fight your way towards some kind of unifying principle. None of you are painters of detail for its own sake, which is the obvious way to handle complexity. Rather, you're looking for underlying phenomena. Is that a fair assessment? If so, how does it play out in your work? If not, how would you characterize it instead?

Pieter Bruegel​ The Hunters in the Snow​ 1565​ oil on panel​ 46 x 63¾ in.

Pieter Bruegel​ The Hunters in the Snow​ 1565​ oil on panel​ 46 x 63¾ in.

PSG: "Taming complexity" - I like this characterization. Your assess-ment is fair, I do search for a simplified scheme. It is a constant battle for me because I love to paint all that detail. For my work, I found it takes a lot of drawings, color studies, and rethinking before I find a good design. Afterwards, after all this looking, the details emerge and are placed with a purpose. I also look to historical painters whose work is complex yet solid. One such lesson came from "Hunters in the Snow" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I was curious to find the substructure underneath all his details. So yes, the underlying concern of mine is that of a unifying foundation.

Paula Swaydan Grebel​ Bruegel Study, Hunter in the Snow​ 2019​ oil on paper​ 12 x 16 in.

Paula Swaydan Grebel​ Bruegel Study, Hunter in the Snow​ 2019​ oil on paper​ 12 x 16 in.

GS: That’s why I love the still life. It’s an arena. The still life is my painting world, and I can put objects in it, take them out, and move them around. One object may have a lead role in one painting, and then in the next painting, a supporting role. The search for “underlying phenomena”- that is absolutely a fair assessment. I see the still-life as a zone. A time zone, or a state of mind. It’s a slowing-down. The stillness is always amplified to me because I am painting from something still. Once I have a still-life world, an object has to be able to exist in it. The still-life world comes first, then the objects. What underlies isn’t usually about the literalness of the objects, though I like that I can paint about an object. What underlies is that painting world, which leads the way. I feel like this is a phenomenon.

JG: There's that great quote by Delacroix: "Exactitude is not truth". I tell my students that painting a scene realistically is not a matter of taking inventory, but of figuring out how each element counts uniquely with the painting. So for me the underlying phenomena is the visual energy of a scene, revealed by a particular light. Our perceptions are naturally subjective, and the task is to try to organize them pictorially, in the hope of uncovering the necessary character of each element. Sounds simple, but of course it's anything but!

FE: What role does the still life play in relation to the rest of your work?

GS: I’ve continuously been drawn to the intimacy of the still-life as a quiet, shallow space. But I have also seen the still-life as a landscape, a portrait, an abstract opportunity. I like that the still-life can be this metaphor for something else, and at the same time refer back to itself. Through painting the still-life, I have always felt a freedom. Just thinking about the phrase “still life” slows down time and allows me to contemplate stillness.

I love the objects that I choose to paint. Many I have painted for over forty years. I am interested in a painted world which will allow my objects to exist together in different ways. The particularities of their relationships can enhance and use their idiosyncrasies. Sometimes, I make a painting about a singular object. An object can have a different importance when alone in a painting; and I feel differently when I paint thinking only of one object. If a painting with one object hangs next to another painting with only one object, there might be a connection. Maybe the object wants to be in the other painting. If I am convinced, I may put these two objects together in my next painting.

PSG: The still life offers an excuse to paint indoors in the studio, away from distractions. It is not boring or expected. Each new day I approach the same setup with different emotions, attention, ideas. I may notice something that wasn't obvious to me before. It can be a hidden shape observed by grouping objects within their shadows. Unexpected colors appear when placed side by side with complimenting colors. The still life enables opportunities for long moments in looking. This allows discovery, surprises, and exciting occurrences. The still life offers endless perceptual moments and visual experiences that are exciting. It is another reason to make a painting, my favorite thing to do.

Paula Swaydan Grebel Yellow Room and Black Cat 2019 oil on panel​ 8 x 8 in. (SOLD)

Paula Swaydan Grebel Yellow Room and Black Cat 2019 oil on panel​ 8 x 8 in. (SOLD)

JG: I like considering a still life as an intimate version of a landscape, the difference being that you oversee the motif instead of occupying it, and you get a chance to re-arrange objects and maybe the light source. The still life is intimate and finite, and the landscape can be overarching and infinite, but for both one has to organize one's sensations.

​​​​​​​​JG: I'd put it this way: Our visual perceptions are subjective, which means that the way we compose a scene are too. The curve of a road might play a big part in locating other elements on the ground, or be just a faint echo of clouds in the sky. A tree's canopy might be a dense blotting out of sky, or an exuberant eruption from a trunk. Distant houses could be lively interruptions of the long drone of a horizon, or perhaps subtle echoes of foreground fence posts. The challenge is ordering everything at once, and this is so complex and intuitive a task that it may take many false starts and reworkings. Or, for me, countless abandoned efforts.


FE: John, could you say more about "organizing one's sensations"? What does that entail?

JG: I'd put it this way: Our visual perceptions are subjective, which means that the way we compose a scene are too. The curve of a road might play a big part in locating other elements on the ground, or be just a faint echo of clouds in the sky. A tree's canopy might be a dense blotting out of sky, or an exuberant eruption from a trunk. Distant houses could be lively interruptions of the long drone of a horizon, or perhaps subtle echoes of foreground fence posts. The challenge is ordering everything at once, and this is so complex and intuitive a task that it may take many false starts and reworkings. Or, for me, countless abandoned efforts.

FE: Paula and Gwen - do you have your own ways of organizing your sensations? To put it another way, what internal frame do you invoke in order to bring yourself to painting?

PSG: When I paint the still life, I respond to the depth of colors, shapes, design, and intrigue. The glass holes to look through, the stripes that peak over flat shapes, square versus round. My eyes enter the picture frame, I see the movement of things from here to there. I settle in one area, an area with more detail and brighter colors, harder lines. It is a play of all these that move the eye about. All is an excuse to make a painting, a design within the rectangle. If I am excited and can paint this beauty, then I am happy with the results. Another thing I have done is to make many small studies of the same set-up. I try different values and color combinations. This process has helped me to see what my options are. It helps me to edit, to better understand and express my point of view.

GS: I have a lot of objects in my studio. I have made paintings where I organize objects into a still-life. And, I have found still lifes made by accident. But because I work mostly from memory now, organization is a different, slower process, that seems fitting for the paintings I make. I am adding and subtracting much more than I ever have. I like that only I might know that an object once existed in a painting.

I believe when an artist walks into their studio, who they are as an artist reinforces their paintings and decision making. Of course there are other influences. I walk into my studio, and my paintings are there, with their problems that need to be solved. And that’s one way I get started. My own paintings influence me. When I am surrounded by my paintings, I am strengthened by who I am as a painter. That creates a natural organization of responsiveness, and a need to paint. For me, it is an intuitive and most important way of getting started. Also, I love paint. I love my objects. Somehow that combination has always been extremely important to how I end up making these paintings.

John Goodrich is a New York-based painter, teacher, and writer who exhibits at Bowery Gallery and with Zeuxis in New York City. His paintings have appeared in group shows at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Kouros Gallery and Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York City, the Contemporary Realist Gallery in San Francisco and numerous other venues around the country. His work has been mentioned in reviews in The New York Times, The New York Sun, The New York Observer, The New Haven Register and other publications.


Born in California, Paula Swaydan Grebel received her BFA in Figure Drawing and a Minor in Textiles from the California State University of Long Beach. After moving to Wisconsin in the 1990s she has continued studying here and abroad with key perceptual painters. Paula teaches painting and drawing workshops throughout the states. You will find her work in public and private collections worldwide. Paula's paintings have shown in group exhibitions in Italy and Berlin, Germany. Other shows include THERE an art space and First Street Gallery, New York. John Michael Kohler Art Center, and The Museum of Wisconsin Art, Wisconsin. The Foyer Gallery, Wichita, Kansas, Brick Gallery, Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Gallery HB, Huntington Beach, California. Represented by Tory Folliard Gallery

​​​​​​
Gwen Strahle lives and works in eastern CT. She has been exhibiting with Zeuxis since 2012. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the country, and recently at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects. She holds a BA from Rhode Island College, and an MFA from Yale School of Art. She has been teaching drawing at Rhode Island School of Design since 1984, and has taught workshops at Art New England and Black Pond Studio.

While maintaining a studio practice as an artist in Boston, Franklin Einspruch is also active in art criticism, comics, and alternative publishing. His art has appeared in 19 solo exhibitions and 40 group exhibitions. He has been a resident artist at programs in Italy, Greece, Taiwan, and around the United States, and was the Fulbright-Q21/MuseumsQuartier Wien Artist-In-Residence for 2019. He has authored 221 essays and art reviews for many publications including The New Criterion and Art in America. He produces one of the longest-running blogs about visual art, Artblog.net, and a webcomic, The Moon Fell On Me. His imprint, New Modern Press, publishes the anthology Comics as Poetry and Cloud on a Mountain.

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Mark Mulhern's, "Gatherings," Reviewed on Shepherd Express by Shane McAdams

*to see the original review on the Shepherd Express website, please click HERE

Mark Mulhern Captures a Party Mood at Tory Folliard's 'Gatherings'

by: Shane McAdams - Nov. 03, 2020

Mark Mulhern’s GATHERING, Oil on Linen, 36" x 44"

Mark Mulhern’s GATHERING, Oil on Linen, 36" x 44"

For a moment, Mark Mulhern’s exhibition “Gatherings” at Tory Folliard made me forget I was indoors during a pandemic, socially-distanced and wearing a mask…which caused my glasses to slowly fog, obscuring my view of the same jubilant paintings that seduced me into a dislocated daydream in the first place. This waking experience, backdropped by a retreating Wisconsin autumn twilight, was almost painfully seductive. But only almost.

The paintings in “Gatherings” didn’t transport me simply because they happen to be on lawns populated by convivial figures, as only Mulhern paints them, but rather because they’re the very essence of such a moment. As shamelessly social as a Renoir boating party. All drinks, noshing, and conversation. The title of the 5 x 6-foot painting Decadent Party confirms this for sure. It features two women in evening gowns and pearls locked in a conversation, in front of a finely manicured table offering cake and finger foods, and a uniformed champagne server in the foreground. Pandemics, or even a movie about one, are the last thing on the tongues of these casual partygoers.

The eponymously titled painting Gathering continues the motif of a table of hors d’oeuvres foregrounding a middle ground of elegant but dignified revelers. Lowback-gowned ladies converse on a lawn, as uniformed help fuel their enthusiasms with drinks delivered on trays. Colorful arrays of edible arrangements, patterns on clothing, and dots of string lights whip the whole scene into a confetti of visual activity, reflective of the social effervescence within the mixer itself.

Arranging the Cakes

Despite their being drawn from the same general setting, smaller and more pared-back images break up the repetition of activity in the larger paintings. An almost Diebenkorn-esque composition titled Arranging the Cakes features an uplifting background of rectilinear shapes that go almost abstract, backdropping the more recognizable subject matter in the lower half of the composition. In the foreground, a familiar but more solitary a woman politely surveys a table of party food on white linen. We’ve seen her before, in Gathering, with her sage, red, and white dress, leading us to assume that the exhibition is likely drawn from a single event.

Mulhern’s particular manner of image-making and paint handling is almost idiosyncratic and seductive enough to make one lose their bearings and overlook the recurring place setting. And he seems perfectly happy to allow this to happen. Securing a suitably lively armature on which to hang his loosely painted subjects seems to be his ultimate aim. Like Monet did with haystacks and the aforementioned Renoir did with boating parties, Mulhern’s work feels obligated to his documentation only as far as it lets him play with material delights of giving them a new life in paint and color.

Material chops aside, Mulhern’s naïve figures in “Gathering” reside in a gathering unavoidably evocative of the salad days of our recent and retreating past. And given the state of our collective psyches at the moment, such decadence runs the risk of striking an awkward tone. But then again, I don’t think anyone’s yearning for profound reminders of forced austerity at the moment. America very understandably loved Busby Berkeley films in the 1930s because the real world was offering more than enough cold hard reality. I’m sure I won’t be the only one relishing the chance to feel included in a lush, gurgling, and boozy outdoor gathering, close-talking, and gesticulating with abandon in a moment of pure social possibility. Thinking about it almost makes me wish I had contact lenses, which would’ve allowed me to stay inside the fantasy at Tory Folliard for a few moments longer.

Mark Mulhern's "Gatherings," Reviewed on Urban Milwaukee

*To read the original article on the Urban Milwaukee website, please click HERE

A Party Amidst a Pandemic

Mark Mulhern’s lovely show at Tory Folliard Gallery will cheer you up. Is that so bad?

By: Brendan Murphy. October 27th, 2020.


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People, gestures and space are celebrated and explored through observation, color, and line at an exhibition of 35 works by Mark Mulhern, entitled “Gatherings,” and now at Tory Folliard Gallery. The Milwaukee-based artist, who has spent considerable time in France over the years, has had a career that spans more than 50 years.

Upon entering the exhibit you are greeted by a series of vibrant and complex scenes of social gatherings; it feels as though you’ve wandered into a party to which you were not invited, but no one is asking you to leave. A kind of homage to people watching, most of the pictures are flooded with figures, color, and pattern elements that repeat themselves through many of the compositions, allowing for smooth transitions from one to the next. There are paintings, drawings, monotypes, and sketches, but none feel out of place; it is easy to forget that mediums even exist because there is so much information to process. As I spent more time with each piece, one by one, I was struck by the tenacity for experimentation and abundant joy in these itchy, scratchy, layered paintings and the loopy line faces mixed amongst blocky, but descriptive figures draped in patterned clothing. Each work drew me in and turned out different than expected upon further inspection.

In the painting “Gathering,” the full range of Mulhern’s technique is on display: Familiar sweets and bottles of wine on a table in the foreground; figures intermingling amongst one another and amongst layers of the picture plane; and trees covered with small lights scattered into the distance of the painting. It’s lovely, but upon further inspection questions arise: are there children in the distance, or just figures sized down in accordance with the painting’s perspective? There are a woman’s legs that seem too large to be placed so far into the distance, impossible for a properly sized person; and blobs that vanish into the distance that read as people and become more monochromatic as the eye follows them into the upper right-hand corner. Many classical techniques that allow a two-dimensional representation of the human experience to be convincing are on display, yet there are some elements that do not fit into that neat formula of how to convince an onlooker they are viewing into the distance. Like Edouard Manet’s “Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe,” things appear normal and then there is a figure that challenges our ideas of linear perspective.

In other paintings the guests at these plush soirees seem as though they are not even in our moment in history, wearing gowns and petticoats that look Victorian, so not only is the perspective non-linear, but so is time. In the mixed-media piece “Party In Full Swing” the clothing is all over the place with pattern and styles that seem to be from different eras in fashion. To accompany these clashing yet cohesive garments there is an interesting mix of styles of representation, figures and objects similar to those in other works, where they are slightly blocked in and some made up of pattern, but now with the addition of representation through line — line work that is reminiscent of Matisse to relay the visual information of bottles, tables, chairs and people. It’s an intimidating prospect to try and fit all of this into one composition, but through years of practice, sketching, and honing his style Mulhern can pull it off.

The new way in which we view such gatherings and parties, amid a pandemic when we can no longer safely partake in them, makes this show even more interesting. The work on its own would be excellent, but because of the lack of in-person connection we all now suffer through, it speaks much louder and with more poignancy to me. The work is beautiful, but with an undercurrent of melancholy, and this feeling is only amplified by our collective predicament. I highly recommend the show, the work is unique and offers an oddly festive escape from current events.