CATHERINE HOWE + DAVID KIMBALL ANDERSON: The Audacious Still Life

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art 

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is pleased to present The Audacious Still Life, featuring new works by Catherine Howe and David Kimball Anderson. This exhibit will run from March 10 - April 22, 2017, with an opening reception on Friday, March 10, 2017, from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

Utilizing the natural world as a vehicle of expression for their new works, both Catherine Howe and David Kimball Anderson take an adventurous approach in redefining and reinvigorating the still life genre.  Howe’s focus is primarily the process of painting, applying new materials and methodologies within her work.  Anderson’s sculptures integrate the spiritual with the physical world through the assimilation of planetary bodies within his potted flowers. These two artists not only offer the viewer an immediate beauty, but they also provide an entirely audacious perspective on what constitutes still life.

Working with unique and contemporary materials to create her alchemical magic, Catherine Howe uses the sensual language of nature as a jumping-off point for her inventiveness and ingenuity.  In her Mica paintings, Howe experiments with loose interference mica pigment suspended in acrylic resin as her canvas base, delivering a subtly reflective surface which changes from silver to gold.  With a contrasting, matte gesso mixture applied with thick, sweeping, fluid brushstrokes, Howe conjures up a bold, swirling floral still life that shimmers with light, exuberance, and feeling.  Juxtaposing the radiance of the Mica paintings, Howe’s Carborundum and Silver works feature flowers and bulbs painted with acrylic, silver metal leaf, and carborundum grit. These abstracted floral forms seem to shift in a frenzied fashion, dynamic to behold. In the context of art history, these paintings have abstract expressionist tendencies, but her gestural work is something completely original and new.

Throughout his forty-five-year career, David Kimball Anderson’s sculpture has been described as “a contemplation on the meaning of things that give beauty and pleasure.” In his new body of work, Anderson’s life-sized, three-dimensional floral steel and bronze still life sculptures, contained in square or rounded shaped vases, incorporate spheres that are configured to astronomical transits occurring seasonally in the heavens. These still-life constructions, minimalistic in style, reinforce Anderson’s life-long pursuit of merging his spiritual practice with his nature-based artwork. In his piece, “October Transits,” the orange fall fruit concurrently appear delicate and heavy, industrial and fragile. Four spheres extend upwards and outward revealing the planetary alignments, suggesting that all is connected. All is one.

About the Artists

Catherine Howe’s paintings have been exhibited extensively in the United States, including a concurrent solo exhibition at the New York Academy of Art.  Other exhibitions include VonLintel Gallery, Lesley Heller Workspace, Casey Kaplan, Liz Koury, Littlejohn Contemporary, Bill Maynes Gallery, Slein/ Schmidt, St Louis, Kim Light, Los Angeles. Exhibitions abroad include Yukiko Kawase, Paris, Salama Caro Gallery, London, Johan Jonker, Amsterdam. She has a MFA from SUNY Buffalo and is currently a Professor on the Graduate Painting Faculty at the New York Academy of Art, where she leads a seminar on contemporary art.

David Kimball Anderson has received a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, three NEA Arts Fellowships, and a California State University Research Grant. His work is in the collections of: Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, National Endowment for the Arts, the World Bank, Art in Embassies, Washington, DC, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, Albuquerque Museum and the City of Albuquerque, NM. From 1967-1971, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute.