| |
 |
Rita Baragona - Acrylics
St. Clair Sullivan - Oils
A Marriage of Two Minds
Opening Reception: Friday, September 25, 7:00 to 9:00PM
Saturdays and Sundays, September 26 to October 11,
1:00 to 5:00 PM
Rita Baragona and St. Clair Sullivan have been living and painting together since they
met as students at the New York Studio School nearly 40 years ago. They fell in love at
the Metropolitan Museum, holding hands in front of Chardin's Soap Bubbles and Renoir's great portrait of Mme. Charpentier and Her Children. They went on to have
children of their own, two fine sons, and continued to paint, to show their work in and
around New York, and to haunt the museums. They are firmly united in their devotion to
the great painters of the Western tradition, but also in their love of the light in the world
around them. They both study nature to understand the effects of light, and for both of
them, the primary point of painting is achieving radiance or luminosity.
With such common purpose and life experience, you might expect look-alike paintings,
but that is hardly the case. Her paintings find radiance in color. They are bright, lightfilled,
immediate notations of her sensations in front of still lifes and landscapes. His
landscapes, on the other hand, have strong tonal underpinnings, are painstakingly
detailed, and achieve their radiance with the accumulation of many small touches.
Where she always works from direct observation, he uses photographs for reference, as
well as direct observation. Two very different approaches to painting by two artists who
are devoted to each other and to each other's art, who understand intimately what the
other is driving at, and who live to support the other's efforts.
Rita Baragona was born in New York in 1945. She received a BFA from Carnegie
Mellon University in 1967, and attended the New York Studio School from 1968 to 1970.
She teaches art at Blair Academy in Blairstown, New Jersey.
Click
for larger version
Rita Baragona
Since 1979, she has had twelve one-person exhibitions at the Bowery Gallery in New
York. Other selected one-person shows have been at the Walker-Kornbluth Gallery,
New Jersey, 2006; Fairleigh Dickinson University, 2004; the Washington Art Association,
Connecticut, 2004. Selected group shows include the Lori Bookstein Gallery, Kouros
Gallery, Borgenicht Gallery, Midtown Payson Gallery, and the New York Studio School,
all in New York; the Noyes Museum in New Jersey; the Well Street Gallery in Fairbanks,
Alaska; Rider University, New Jersey; Lyme Academy, Connecticut; Bryn Mawr College.
Click
for larger version
Rita Baragona
Residencies include the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, the Dorland Mountain Arts
Colony, California, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work is reproduced in T.
Sullivan, The Best of Drawing. Selected bibliography includes Jed Perl, Gallery Going,
and reviews in New Criterion, Art in America, Art and Antiques, and the New Republic.
Click
for larger version
Rita Baragona
St. Clair Sullivan lives and works in Columbia, New Jersey. Born in 1938 in Baltimore,
he received an A.B. degree in English from Princeton in 1960, and attended the New
York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture from 1967 to 1970.
Click
for larger version
St. Clair Sullivan, Cantilever, 28” x 42”, oil on canvas, 2008
He has had one-person shows at the Kornblee Gallery in New York in 1979 and 1982,
the Academy Gallery in New Orleans in 1984, the Wyckoff Gallery in Wyckoff, New
Jersey in 1994, the Sussex County College in New Jersey in 1997, the Bachelier-
Cardonsky Gallery in Kent, Connecticut in 2001 and 2004, and at Blair Academy in
Blairstown, New Jersey in 2005.
Click
for larger version
St. Clair Sullivan, Grove of the Ancestors, 16” x 20”, oil on board, 2008
Selected group exhibitions include the Kerygma Gallery in Ridgewood, New Jersey in
2007 and 2008, the Noyes Museum in New Jersey in 2005-06, “The New Jersey
Landscape” at Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2004, The New Jersey State Council on
the Arts Fellowship Exhibition at Rutgers Camden in 2004, the Bixler Gallery in
Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania in 1996, and the National Academy of Design in New York in
1982.
Click
for larger version
St. Clair Sullivan, Slateford Farm Woods, 24” x 36”, oil on board, 2008
He has twice received New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship Grants, in 1980
and 2002.
The museum and gallery
are open Saturdays and Sundays from 1:00pm to 5:00pm.
The museum is located behind the Trails End Café on rte
611 in the beautiful town of Delaware Water Gap .
For directions
and more information call 570-476-4240.
|
 |
|
 |
