OPENINGS: Poffenbarger, Berlin show at the Art Store Oct. 14
Susan Poffenbarger’s “Winter Stripes,” pastel on paper, 31″ x 47″
The Art Store opens its fall season on Saturday, Oct. 14, with work by West Virginia landscape artist Susan Poffenbarger and Massachusetts conceptual artist, Nancy Berlin. Poffenbarger marks her 11th solo exhibit at the Art Store, showing 15 new paintings. Working in the impressionist manner, the artist continues her focus on landscape both in West Virginia and Europe, with several winter landscapes included.
Berlin’s work, too, is inspired by nature but in the abstract. Working primarily within a 15 inch x 22 inch format, she builds her paintings using layers of delicate line, color and texture.
“These two very different approaches to the landscape allows the viewer to experience how two artists respond to the complexities that nature offers. The renown American landscape painter, Neil Welliver would say of his paintings, ‘I would call them presentations of nature rather than representations.’ I find this true with these works,” says gallery director, Ellie Schaul.
In a release on the show, Poffenberger says of her latest work: “The energy I put into seeing is often more time consuming than the energy put into painting…. I continue to be inspired by man’s use of the land and have worked to present this, while still achieving the balance, pattern and the intimacy that nature offers.”
Speaking of her paintings, Berlin says: “I am interested in mapping various phenomena of the natural world using marks and systems often seen in cartography, satellite imagery and scientific analysis. The works in this show present a conceptual response and description of the landscape and the plants and animals found in it.”
Poffenbarger’s paintings are in many private, corporate and public collections including the Huntington Museum of Art; Juliet Museum of Art at the Avampato Discovery Museum; the State of West Virginia Mansion Collection and the United States General Service Administration.
Berlin’s work is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collection including the Boston Public Library, the Cape Cod Museum of Fine Arts, and the Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA. In the spring of 2006, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.
One of Nancy Berlin’s abstract paintings representing nature include this one, titled “INTERVAL V,” oil stick on paper, 16″ x 16″.
