Recent Landscapes, Roberta Richman
Looking Up, Looking Down: A Retrospective, Julienne Saslaw
May 31- July 5, 2003
Reception: Saturday, May 31, 5-7 PM

Powerful weather. Raw minerals in a state of upheaval. Sun fired rocks seen through the focus of a circular lens. Deep caverns and ethereal caves. Moonlit nights and blisteringly hot days. States of nature such as these are examined in the upcoming Hera Gallery exhibition, Recent Landscapes, Roberta Richman, and Looking Up, Looking Down: A Retrospective, Julienne Saslaw. Uniting the works of these artists is their love and awe of the fluctuations of landscape, and above all the changing skies, reflecting mental states of agitation, calm, turmoil, or mystery. The show runs May 31- July 5, with a reception on Saturday, May 31, from 5-7 PM.

Jagged waves tear through an agitated body of water as foam jets coalesce in the already saturated air. Rough terrain is hammered by coastal thunderstorms, fast-moving surfaces of rocks are slick with mud, heaving land formations let loose from their moorings in explosive collisions. Gravity defying rocks demonstrate their might by appearing to tumble upwards. These activities mark the landscapes portrayed in Roberta Richman's latest series of tumultuous, small-scale oils on paper. Above: Roberta Richman, Pyramid Lake, oil on paper, 16" x 24:

These paintings were made in response to photos and the artist's memory of the landscape. In addition to what Richman describes as "the dramatic, stormy, and somewhat foreboding" paintings of ice fields and glaciers of British Columbia, this group of works is balanced by a "lyrical, soft and bucolic series of Cape Cod derived landscapes." Like echocardiograms graphing the rhythms of a human heart, Richman's richly textured works chart the activity of the landscape, measuring either its vitality or its calm. The artist reveals that most works undergo four or five stages before she arrives at her final image.

At Right: Roberta Richman, Kootenay Morraine, oil on paper, 16" x 24"

Richman is interested in portraying the evidence of change and time upon the landscape. For instance, Kootenay Morraine, which references the British Columbian landscape, shows a series of advancing hills. Instead of receding into the background as the fields yield to hills and to sky, the whole landscape actively marches forwards and sideways and is diagonally drawn towards the center. Unfettered hills bear an uneasy course, suggesting waves in the eye of a hurricane rather than immobile land formations. The plane of the field in the foreground tilts abruptly upwards, where it meets rows of darkened umber hills that converge at a narrowed v in the center of the picture. Incongruously suspended between the hills is a bright cerulean lake, narrowly avoiding becoming crumpled. The icy, far distant landscape and the sky above it sandwich the striated configuration in place and balance the weight of the supporting field in the foreground. The geological title provides much insight: a moraine is an accumulation of earth, rocks, and silt that marks the farthest limits of glaciation. Richman's work conveys a sense of kinetic energy and movement that must have occurred as the glacier deposited its load of rocks and soil before receding.

Although appearing spontaneous, Richman's works result from her careful study of the landscape through photographs and memory. She reveals that a methodical use of photographs helps her to analyze details and segments of the landscape that are not apparent while on scene.

She says, "Looking at endless horizons or panoramic views is fascinating and moving but also overwhelming. Focusing on pieces of what I see in sequence through the camera's lens helps me to understand what it is that has drawn me to a particular landscape. The color, the contrast of values, the composition of shapes attract me; the photographs help to organize my impressions and supplement my memory giving me a starting point."

Painter Roberta Richman is a founding artist member of Hera Gallery who has played a crucial role in Hera's mission and operations since 1974. For seven years in the 1970s and 1980s she served as Hera's administrative director, and she is currently the Treasurer for the Board of Directors. She holds an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a BA from Brooklyn College, NYC. She has also studied at Pratt Graphic Art Center in New York. She has held numerous solo and group shows throughout New England, New York, and New Jersey as well as nationally. Her work has moved from abstraction in her early career towards representation, as evident by her current series of landscapes on paper. Richman is a Peace Dale resident.

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At Left: Julienne Saslaw , Marsh II oil & encaustic, 23" x 28",

Meanwhile, in Julienne Saslaw's first solo exhibition at Hera, the artist displays a diverse group of landscape paintings, some of which are displayed on the wall while others are placed on the floor and viewed aerially. Saslaw brings us distant buttes and alien landscapes seen through a summer squint. Ethereal and uninhabited caves are juxtaposed with scenes of clogged marshlands swathed with layers of paint. The silver vein of a river is glimpsed aerially as a tangle upon a canyon floor. Presented as a retrospective to viewers who have not seen Saslaw's works (she relocated from Long Island fairly recently), these landscapes are strengthened by Saslaw's interest in surface and material. She often works on multiple panels, which are then put together in one final form. Her densely textured paintings incorporate wood, steel, oil paint, acrylics, aqua pencil, watercolor, encaustic, and often combine several media.

According to Saslaw, her work expresses the non-verbal and results from direct observation and memory to suit her aesthetic concerns. She asserts that her work "addresses primal emotions and reactions to natural phenomenon." She continues,

"In looking directly, I can negate perspective to be able to simplify earth and cloud shapes and call forth an intense visceral experience like looking down from an airplane window, the height of an eagle, a hawk, a sparrow, or a human being."

Possessed with a hidden energy source, circular wind patterns and eddying tides subtly indicate deep forces residing beneath the surfaces of Saslaw's works, fusing the visible and invisible. With an almost obsessive regularity seen repeatedly in these works done over the course of several years, Saslaw employs a series of concentric or nearly concentric circles embedded into her surface. At times this surface is immediately apparent, at other times it is perceptible primarily as a texture and otherwise not indicated by color or line, like an unseen armature or a veil. Sometimes this pattern functions as a static, stabilizing grid to maintain structural integrity of the forms, but more often, it lends a dynamism to the surrounding imagery. At it's most active, the circular structure conveys not a set of untouching circles, but a spiral. The spiral itself puts forth its own entirely different set of associations-- a cyclone gathering forth as it incorporates unseen forces generated from water, heat, waves, currents and winds; an ever arching source of motion, reaching dizzyingly outwards from its' inception well past the edges of the canvas or panel on which the image is painted; or conversely, a meditative, inward directed curve.

Of this circle Saslaw states, "The archetypal concept of an organic circular shape which is not perfectly round is my visual center. This 'humanized circle' is, for me, visually attractive and aesthetically fulfilling. It also symbolized the human struggle to interact with our primal sun-moon dependency. I include this in all my work. Sometimes it is dominant. At other times it lies just barely visible under textures created with layers and layers of paint."

Saslaw's use of color is both vibrant and subtle. Deepening undercurrents of hue and shade softly delineates her forms of clouds, grasses and other natural elements. The resulting atmospheres are as much an exploration of pictorial surface as of illusionistic imagery.
For instance, in both Marsh II and Sunset, she relies on subtly shifting tints and often complementary colors, whose intensity is alternately enhanced or muted by the many layers of paint crusted beneath. Though saturated, the use of layered color in these works relies more on complexity of technique than pure pigmentation- the range of Saslaw's palette within a given work is relatively limited, despite the richness of her surfaces.

Mixed media artist and painter Julienne Saslaw relocated from New York to Rhode Island in 1999 and joined Hera in 2002. Locally she has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at the Wickford Art Association and Newport's DeBlois Gallery. She has participated in numerous group shows locally including the 2003 16th Annual Members' Show at the Newport Art Museum, where she received first prize in painting, and Hera's 9/11/01, held in December of 2001. Saslaw's exhibition record in New York is extensive, and in addition to participating in numerous invitational and juried shows, includes solo exhibitions at Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY, Roxbury Arts Center, Roxbury, NY; and b.j. spoke gallery, Huntington, NY. As an artist active in TANA (fifteen artists exhibiting together) from 1992-1998, she showed her work at venues such as the New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, NY; Alfred Van Loen Gallery, Huntington, NY; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY among others. In 1995 Saslaw earned a grant from the New York Fine Arts art council, administered through the East End Arts Council; in 1989, she received an award from the Council for the Arts on the North Shore, Sabbath Art Gallery, Glen Cove, NY. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Newsday, and listed in Art in America as well in local papers. She received a BA from Hunter College in Art, New York, NY, and a MA in Art and Art Education from Columbia University, Teacher's College, New York, NY.

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