Annual Call For Artists

“So often it’s the smaller galleries tucked in surprising places that offer up the best art exhibitions. The Courthouse Gallery in Lake George is no exception.” - The Saratoga Post, Saratoga Springs, NY.

2005 Exhibition Schedule

Ed Smith, January 22 – March 4. 

Due to the winter storm on January 22nd the gallery talk and reception for Ed Smith was canceled.  Reception and gallery talk are now rescheduled for Friday, March 4th , 6 - 8 pm. 

Ed Smith

In an essay written for the exhibition, Katherine Hart, Director of the Hood Museum, NH, writes “The ‘Attention Drawings’ possess a certain raw quality - a vulnerability, and anger that are coupled with the emblematic and visionary. It is as if the comic genius Robert Crumb intertwined his edgy images with the apocalyptic and idiosyncratic visions of the eighteenth-century artist and poet William Blake.”   Speaking on the practice of drawing, Ed Smith says “What I like best is the clarity of it. It is you and the idea, with the barest means between the two. To draw is to address fear - nothing between you and the idea. Drawing is where you work away fear, concerns and end with pure joy.  Basically, you can take everything else away: sculpture, painting, printmaking, everything, and we could still exist with drawing.”

  Ivan Fortushniak and Aaron Holz,  March 26 - April 29.  Opening Reception: Saturday, March 26, 4 - 6 pm.

   Ivan Fortushniak                                     Aaron Holz

This exhibit features two artists combining traditional painting genres (landscape and portraiture) with unconventional painting techniques.    

Ivan Fortushniak’s paintings of rural landscapes are populated with airplanes, smoke stacks, and water towers.  These man-made elements create a sense of discord and anxiety as they interrupt pastoral scenes. He says: “they present themselves as foreign elements within the landscape.” Fortushniak uses techniques of glazing, scumbling, burning, scrapping, and breaking to create a distressed painting surface. Experimenting with these techniques has liberated him “from conforms of traditional painting techniques that leave little room for experimentation.” He says, “My work investigates the corrosion of historical landscape painting and our environment…. Much of the process is experimental while the aim is to create distressed surfaces that expose a sense of history toward the painting and its subject matter”. 

Aaron Holz's small scale “portraits” depict detached heads floating in a sea of patterned wavy lines. Holz works with oil, resin, and acrylic to create a thick, slick, shiny surface within a textured ground.  The ground is created with thick layers of gesso, which is then combed in multiple directions. The portrait is created on a layer of clear resin that is poured over that textured surface.  The portraits, usually of Holz’s friends, are painted in a hyper-real technique with semi-transparent glazes, recalling the work the old Flemish masters.  He says: “I am interested in the implied depth of the painting and the physical depth of the material. This work combines the disparate worlds of optical art and portraiture in ways that challenge traditional figure/ground relationships in painting.”

Josh Dorman

Josh Dorman creates imaginary landscapes using colored inks on antique papers or old topographical maps.  He is inspired and guided by the by the paper’s preexisting lines, patterns, rivers, mountains, and place names.  Often the abstract landscapes contain objects like machines, monsters or strange unidentified forms eluding gravity. The floating forms in space could function as symbols, or clues in a story.  The space is flattened, tilted, twisted, even turned inside-out as buildings emerge from the map’s grid work, a river is filled with colored ink, or a ladder carries you over a hill, or through the air. He says "I have no interest in interpreting my dreams and I don’t attempt to paint images from my dreams.  But if the process of placing color next to color takes on the wondrous, warped, absolute logic of the dream-state, and a believable world grows, then I can experience the painting as a genuine surprise.”

This exhibition is partially underwritten by    

Zoo: Artists Look at Animals, July 9 - August 26.  Opening Reception: Saturday, July 9, 4 - 6 pm.

Christopher Kurtz	Valerie Shaff
Brian Burkhardt	Linda Horn

William Schade	TODT

Group exhibition featuring animals in art. Exhibiting artists: B.A. Bosaiya (Renton, WA), Brian Burkhardt (Boston, MA), Sarah Hauser (New York, NY), Linda Horn (Spencertown, NY), Christopher Kurtz (Germantown, NY), Billie Grace Lynn (Miami, FL), Bill Scanga (New York, NY), William Schade (Williamstown, MA), Valerie Shaff (Germantown, NY), TODT (Brooklyn & Corinth, NY).

Elizabeth Terhune

Elizabeth Terhune’s small scale abstract oil paintings are inspired by the natural world, from small objects found on the forest floor, such as sticks and rocks, to the larger spaces found in the landscape.  Her approach to paint is direct and expressive, creating fresh luminous colors and a rich surface reflecting the patterns and texture of the landscape.  She says:  “My work emulates nature, and how I see delicacy in it everywhere, even in blunted, unadorned things like sticks…. I think of landscape as one of the many spaces within nature.  Some of my paintings evoke landscape….My process is gestural and intuitive within a strong modernist/formal orientation.  I make my own gesso, and often use traditional materials and tools.”

      

Gina Occhiogrosso’s work focuses on obsessive thoughts and actions. In her cross-stitch drawings and embroideries often one word or thought is compulsively stitched over and over. Many works reference her numerous and laborious day jobs, as well as rejections from galleries, art colonies, and other various kinds of jobs. With sensitivity and a fresh sense of humor she attempts to answer questions:  How and why she makes art, what keeps her from making art, how much art she makes, and failed attempts at making art.  She says “In an attempt to make something perfect I have found that true beauty lies in the flaws, rejections, failures, revisions and struggles of everyday life. These things seem more universal to me, and through them I am able to create something constructive using humor, thought and touch”.

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