Oct 12 and 13th 2024 marked the fifth Open Studio event in Hudson NY. The weather on Saturday was glorious; Sunday was chilly and drippy, but the diehard art trick-or-treaters stuck with it.
Folk sauntered from Washington Street to Allen, from Worth Ave to 1st St, looking for the studios on the Open Studio map-card, the ones with jpegs which beckoned. 35 Hudson artists opened their studios to whomever happened in, so the event was largely about happenstance, for both the viewers and the artists. This Open Studio event is an opportunity for a straight-forward look at the artwork in situ, with the artist present. These interactions take place without the interposition of curators and gallerists. So, viewer and raw art presented by the artist.
Some studios were spacious, but most were shared spaces and/or cramped in a NYC kind of way. Many studios were funky—reminding me of 80’s Lower East Side studios. This year there was only one “pop-up” art space—a screening room at Time and Space Limited was graciously shared (myself the fortunate recipient).
The conversations that viewers could have with the artists ranged from flights of fancy, to serious discussions of technique and intent. To a lesser extent, there was discussion of current politics—so furtive that one could wonder whether bringing up the looming election now has become a taboo. Did we do that? How and when did that happen?
Another subject discussed by a few was the gentrification of art spaces in Hudson and how this affects artists. About a third of the artists I spoke with mentioned having to leave Hudson, moving to where rents are in more in keeping with an artist’s means. Catskill, Valatia, and other outlying communities are mentioned as potential affordable places to live/work. Those communities are plenty funky, and more affordable—now. We know where that winds up. And one would need a working car…
Those of us who, decades ago, re-located in the Hudson Valley, running from meteoric art-space rent gouging in NYC can remember—cheap rents in Soho (briefly!), followed by the Lower East Side, then near Brooklyn and Queens, then far Brooklyn and Queens, Jersey City and eventually the Hudson Valley). We now are “checking out” outlying communities around Hudson. One will have to go further afield for a decent croissant, or an absurdly costly cocktail. Oh, well.
Mangled in this gentrification is not having places for artists to share ideas with each other (coffee shops, bars, etc). Have you wondered why we don’t have shared schools of thoughts—like, say, the surrealists did? Texting really doesn’t make up for the devastations of conversation.
Walking around, this year, I also noticed a glaring absence. There is virtually no protest art. This has not always been the case in Hudson. Surprising, too, as the subject is relentlessly right before our eyes.
I confess that I missed many of the artists on the open studio roster, because as I viewed work I was also shepherding my film for this event at Time and Space Limited.
Hudson artists’ work of special note:
Mary Breneman works in a moderate-sized studio bordering the Hudson park, full of oil paintings, mostly of landscapes. There’s a lot to see. She mentions Milton Avery, which is apt—his influence moves like an oblique breeze through these, but there is a glorious sense—perhaps a love of Hudson Valley light—in many of these paintings. It’s not like Avery’s seascapes but instead, these are landscapes enclosed by forest.There’s also an irrational streak in some of these—several paintings have land masses floating without gravity above the ground, and there's one with an isolated column of rain (image below) on a lawn.
She spoke about control over one’s paintings—of steering oneself in new directions which she immediately qualified with—she doesn’t exactly steer. Her intentions will or won’t be evident, and control is not her aim. She is disciplined, though—she practices with small plein air works (i.e. with the subject in full view); not an end in itself but an exercise to warm up into the paintings.
Breneman has been painting for over 30 years. What makes her persevere? She answers forthright “I have to, it’s all I think about.” And...she will lose her studio soon, and speaks of moving to Catskill.
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Jane Erlich—
I do enjoy visiting Jane Ehrlich’s studio. The conversation is real, relevant, and often fun. I have previously written about Ehrlich’s "disappearing paintings" of 2019— loose gauzy translucent white swaths against a single color background. She went on to paint light swaths which were more sharply delineated. Then Ehrlich defied her monochromacy by adding an additional swath of a differing color . Given how strict and thoughtful her abstraction is, that color swath is jarring.
She has also exploded, briefly, into paintings with many myriad swaths of color, breaking every rule she had set. These paintings do allow for the clutch to be engaged and the gears to shift.
So now she is painting color fields without hard-edged swaths— ellipses, of nearly the same color as the background, sinking into the background.
What are we looking at? Yellow on…yellow? Ehrlich keeps moving toward the bliss of color. This new work is glorious. And I really want to see Ehrlich’s work when she gets where she is headed.
Also—of note— Jane Ehrlich organizes these yearly Open Studio events in Hudson. She expresses concern that rising rents may force her to move.
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Nicolas Dalton’s studio on Warren Street has soft northern light and a lovely calm. I was initially drawn to look at his work because he quoted the Pratyabhijnahrdayam sutra in his personal statement, and I wanted to learn its relationship to the work.. In his studio were small acrylic paintings of rippling energy? Or water? and drawings of circles and ellipses longitudinally linked by internal lines—sort of like the skeletons for a single-celled creatures—or images remotely akin to Ernst Haeckel’s drawings of flora and fauna.
In his artist’s statement he writes: “Because nothing ever remains simple, I set basic, somewhat arbitrary, rules from which to build series of related paintings/drawings. A rule can be as simple as, for instance, using only two colors. The friction from these constraints allows me to explore, learn, and build from one painting to the next until I reach a point where the rules have to be broken in order to continue. When too many rules are broken, it’s most likely time for a new series.”
I didn’t ask him about the sutra, but his statement and the work I viewed answered my query. This is thoughtful, sublime work.
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Jeff Starr has worked in his studio in an early 20th century house near Warren Street for about 11 years. Downstairs is gallery space, with a wall filled with small bright intricate paintings. Upstairs is a small, funky, cluttered studio.
These recent works, entitled “The Dollar Tree” are made on heavy (400 lb) paper,/board, drawn / painted with acrylic and marker. There are scattered cartoony 2 dimensional images floating/flying over entirely disparate landscapes. There is a clear disjunction between the superimposed floating images and the partially-in-shadow, landscape spaces behind, which is what makes these images so engaging. They initially resemble collages or appliquéd superimpositions, but they are not. The semiabstract flat cartoon images are painted first, and then the surrounding deep landscape is filled in. The superimposed cartoons are bright and colorful like things one might see in a Dollar store, knitted into backgrounds which are meticulous nineteenth century landscapes in the Hudson River style. The effect—seeing something floating over a landscape—is hallucinatory, or something like deep reverie. And like hallucination, one is drawn in, bothered in a wonderful way by the question—what is it that I am seeing?
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Pauline De Carmo—has recently been painting numerous small paintings of clouds which she displays on the studio wall in a loose grid. I inquired, had she been observing the spectacular clouds around this neck of the woods?—but her answer was just a smile and a shrug. No explanation. She says she likes clouds, and so do I; that’s why I was drawn to these. Well, what’s not to like about clouds?
We did briefly discuss the gathering storm of current politics, an apt conversation sorely missing in many encounters with artists in Hudson. That was a relief.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________Phillip Phillip De Loach’s studio in the funky old Liberty Paint Building is stuffed with innumerable “found” objects—concretions of metallic flotsam and jetsam that have washed up around town, and the curious objects that people have given him. At first look this all appears to be clutter, but de Loach explains the meaning he finds in his uncanny assemblages, and these small sculptures begin to possess a totemic significance. He moves about the space like an ecstatic grasshopper, fascinated with everything around him. His earlier work—paintings and pastels—line the walls, as well as paintings and prints by other artists; he describes these other artist’s work with an exuberant generosity not common among artists. Visiting his studio was a delight—as well as the bedecked car parked outside—which is an assemblage, too.
The Hudson Open Studio event offers us useful insights. Artists, as they hatch out of school or retire from day jobs and/or (for other reasons) diffuse into the Hudson community, must find a workable work space. The paramount imperative is and has always been to make the art possible, and the studio remains the center of that. Open studio events are fun, but far from lightweight. They do cast light on the cost of gentrification on the arts, and in our daily life.
Images described above, presented below.
Mary Brenneman
Jane Ehrlich
Jane Ehrlich
Pauline de Carmo
Nicolas Dalton
Jeff Starr
Phillip de Loach
Sandy Moore’s The Soup of Sleep (installation of film excerpts looped at TS&L)
