Martha Armstrong
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 10 - 5 pm
127 S 16th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
215 - 665 - 8138
Cubist Parrot Finches, 30″ x 30″, Oil On Canvas With Spot Glitter & Mirror Marker
Barbara Sosson: Sensuous Shapes & Mimicry
Throughout her career spanning over 50 years, Barbara Sosson has developed stature in the Philadelphia arts community as a painter, designer, and gregarious personality. In Sensuous Shapes & Mimicry, Sosson struts her stuff with a grouping of new oil paintings that combine two wings of her practice: abstraction and representation.
Sosson began this exhibition with two fully abstract, shape-based paintings, Chills and Knotted, that use formal devices to suggest the effects of specific physiological experiences. Moving deeper into the series, namable components begin to appear. Parts of the human form and the trunk of a tree are nested within flat planes of expressive color and texture. The bulk of the series further incorporates representation by presenting colorful, exotic birds within dynamic shapes, patterns and colors that complement their beautiful plumes.
Material Culture, 14″ x 18″, Oil On Linen
Caleb Stoltzfus: Signs Of Life
In Signs of Life, Caleb Stoltzfus’ grouping of representational oil paintings create unexpected and mysterious narratives set within rural, suburban, and urban landscapes and interiors. His chosen imagery lacks the literal depiction of human forms, yet evidence of life abounds through his intentional placement of tools, clothing, structures, and piles of discarded items that have ostensibly been touched or at some point inhabited by humans.
Stoltzfus’ scenes give the impression of some unidentified action having freshly taken place, perhaps moments before viewers ‘arrive’. There is an implied invitation to investigate the meaning of what is being observed, the objects individually, how they arrived at their current orientations, and what can be inferred...
Bethann Parker, A New Tiger Skin, 5″ x 7″ x 15″, Plaster And Acrylic On Found Object
Family Matter: Group Exhibition, Curated by Joseph Lozano
Family Matter brings together twelve artist-parents whose lives and art practices have been forever changed by parenthood. As is typical for all new parents, the burden of new responsibilities can be a surprise or even a hardship. Resources and overall flexibility are depleted in unpredictable ways which can be particularly challenging for artist-parents who need time to work in their studio or on location for their career opportunities, exhibitions and residencies to flourish.
For this reason, historically, parenthood has been stigmatized within art spheres, especially for women. But the artist-parents in this show have found that the very transformation of their identities through parenthood has ignited their practice anew with purpose and focus, and that what might have been a limitation has now become a creative force.
There is immense joy in watching children create. Whether they are drawing, playing make-believe, or stringing words together...
Susan Moore featured in John Thornton's Remembering Artist Susan Moore
Susan was a few months younger than me and sadly passed away last September at only 69 years of age. She had dozens of one-person shows over the course of her career...Her subjects were the human face, mostly women and sometimes figures. Her media were paint, oil sticks, collage, and photography. She wrote of her “exploration of the unique tensions that the portrait reveals about the self and the assertion of individuality in relation to the quietness of anonymity.”
Staghorn Fern, 44" x 48", Oil On Canvas
Naomi Chung featured in John Thornton's Artist Naomi Chung, Greenhouse Garden
Naomi Chung has a fantastic show of botanical paintings at Philadelphia's Gross McCleaf Gallery. I talk to her about her career and how she moved from abstraction to realism.
Elizabeth Johnson: On Gross McCleaf’s website you describe a farm in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. You write: “The land vibrates with textures, sounds, smells, and crawls with life. Stand in one place too long (to paint a picture, for example) and the dusty straw ground slowly pulls apart . . . revealing the smooth, wet clay beneath.” Did you grow up on a farm? Why the strong bond with dirt and earth? Are you always looking for the basis of things? Or is this feeling a result of standing and working for days on one spot?
Caleb Stoltzfus: My upbringing was suburban. But my dad farmed for much of his life, before I was born, and he comes from a long line of Amish farmers. Farmers often believe, from their experience, they must conquer nature, overcome its dangers...
Miriam Seidel: Were you making art steadily through the years when you were a busy graphic designer, or were there times when you had to set it aside?
Barbara Sosson: I never ever stopped painting. I always had a separate professional studio. Back then, I painted on the weekend. Many nights I worked until 4 a.m. during the week, so I could do that. Right now, it’s the opposite. I paint five days a week and I do design work on the weekend. And I always showed—I had two former solo shows at Gross McCleaf in 1982 and 1983. Estelle Gross, the original owner, invited me to show my Central Divide Series, a two-year series of large Sennelier pastels framed in custom Plexi boxes...
“I am interested in the way birds’ patterns mimic their environments, creating the beautiful and extreme designs of their plumage… Throughout my long painting career, I have worked on many series that are usually multiple years-long and evolve to and from the real and the ideal.”
- Barbara Sosson
Throughout her career spanning over 50 years, Barbara Sosson has developed stature in the Philadelphia arts community as a painter, designer, and gregarious personality. In Sensuous Shapes & Mimicry, Sosson struts her stuff with a grouping of new oil paintings that combine two wings of her practice: abstraction and representation.
Elizabeth Johnson: On the Gross McCleaf website you state: "In an attempt to capture the full spectrum of a constantly evolving world, I break down the constraints that a still landscape offers and opt for compositions and environments that appear to be in a constant state of flux.” What attracts you to capturing change as a still image?
Naomi Chung: Before there was a still, captured image there was the experience of being present and taking in all the information visible and invisible. That is where painting becomes a translator of these experiences. The sounds, movements, glimmering light, temperature, breeze, smells are all evoked in the final painting...
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to host an extensive, two-gallery exhibition of portrait paintings by Susan Moore (1953 - 2022). Works from three decades of Moore's prolific practice will be on view, highlighting a career of both focus and experimentation. The portrait was Moore's career-long subject. She painted family, friends, students and movie stars. However, her approach changed dramatically over the years from tightly painted representation to expressively manipulated photographic imagery.
Ron Abram, Professor of Studio Art & Queer Studies, and Rochelle Toner, Professor and Dean Emeritus of Tyler School of Art & Architecture, generously shared their memories of Susan Moore and insights on her work with writer Elizabeth Johnson. The full interview can be read here: viewingroom.grossmccleaf.com/susan-moore-remembered
Ron Abram, Professor of Studio Art & Queer Studies, Denison University in Granville, Ohio, recalls his teacher, colleague, and close friend, Susan Moore:
"Susan was a confident portrait artist with direct goals, an incredibly strong-focused artist, teacher, mother, spouse, sister, and loyal friend to many. She made friends in all walks of life and treated everyone equally. While she did see her work as an expression of herself, she readily emphasized her goal as an artist to be a universal one: to make work that spoke to viewers on an individual level. Susan was a distinct artist: she parted with historical figurative traditions to connect with contemporary abstraction, not striving to illustrate but to provoke the viewer to see and feel core emotions..."
The United States is a patchwork nation in the largest painting in Tim Doud’s Hemphill Artworks show. “Proposal for a Future Flag (Template)” is a seamless triptych that in total measures roughly 17 feet wide by 10 feet high. The picture leans against the wall at a slight angle, since it’s a bit too tall for the room. Yet the huge speculative banner is not the only magnum opus in Doud’s show, which is titled “Prolepsis” after the literary device of referring to a future event in the present tense.
