GREEN // The Color of Spring

In New York, it's trying very hard to be spring, it feels like it's taking a long time to warm up and change seasons.  In my last post I talked about organ donation, at the same time I sent an eblast with various artworks that to me, represent spring. Green is the color that symbolizes spring.

I received lots of great comments and compliments about the art I selected to represent spring, so I wanted share some of the artworks and acknowledge the artists. I was drawn to nature when thinking about spring, and when I worked with my good friend and graphic designer, Sandy Shekel, to edit the images and create the layout, the greener the better...and there's a reason. Green symbolizes life, new growth, the environment , ecology, recycling and nature.

The lush foliage in COBAMONG BOAT, by Stuart Zaro 

LAUGHTER, by Elena Lyakir

It also represents tranquility, health and luck. We used it for the Share Life logo, to inspire good health and sharing, through organ donation.

Green is also thought to reduce stress and is recommended for a work environment. I'm not sure I'm ready for a return to green walls, but I would love to look at these paintings,

LINE-ING_12"x12", by Xanda McCagg 

and combined with warm colors that evoke a combination of nature and calm, WATERFALL_60"x48", by Anne Raymond   

Christine Wexler's photograph, THE WAVE,  of 3 boys waiting to surf, captures the warmth and spirit of the spring and summer seasons.

There are other artists that come to mind when I think color, and light and spring. Wolf Kahn creates beautiful paintings that evoke nature. I pinned SPRING GREENS on my Pinterest board recently, and it was 're-pinned' and 'liked' many times.

Photographer Bonnie Edelman captures the extraordinary colors of nature in her SCAPES series.

Color theorist Josef Albers explored the relationship of colors and perception in his series of over 1000  geometric paintings, HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE.  One of his green paintings, SOFT SPOKEN,

We will be seeing a lot more green in 2013 since Emerald green was selected by Pantone as the Color of the Year. Versions of emerald will find its way into many products this year.

The spring RE eblast, with the variety of inspiring green artwork was created and sent in support of National Donate Life Month. Thanks to President Obama for making it official and acknowledged throughout the country. My family and I are involved in a number of events during the month to help raise awareness and the profile of the dire need in New York State and throughout the US to increase the organ donor registry. Romanoff Elements will be donating a portion of sales to the New York Organ Donor Network and their work on behalf of increasing the donor registry.

I'm hoping that the sun starts to shine more, and we can all enjoy spring;  the warmth, the natural and beautiful colors, and the new energy that comes with it!

Color // The Power of Red

Red is an emotional color. It elicits feelings, both positive and negative, depending upon its context. Last year, I wrote a blog in February about the color red in art & design and why it has become associated with Valentine's Day. When I began thinking about it recently and if and how I might add to this, I found red was present in many places other than art. It prompted me to think about what else elicits emotion. Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko's "No.1 (Royal Red & Blue)" sold in November 2012 for $75 million at a record-setting Sotheby's contemporary art auction. The NY Times reported that as the bidding was escalating, the dealers described this painting as having "wall power" - as in, it is large, and has presence, a result of the strong color and composition, and thus fetched a significant price.

Leatrice Eiseman, a color specialist, is an "international color guru". She works with color consultant Pantone, and with companies worldwide offering advice on how color can affect their brands. Eiseman says, "People love red".  In her book, "Colors for Your Every Mood", she writes that red evokes a physiological reaction. And since it is believed to promote passion, it's an obvious choice for the bedroom. Red is perceived as the most sensual of all colors and, as the saying goes, 'sex sells.'

Diana Vreeland, the larger than life fashion editor of Harpers Bazaar, Vogue and then Creative Consultant to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum said, "Red is the great clarifier - bright, cleansing, revealing. It makes all colors beautiful. I can't imagine being bored with it ... I wanted this apartment to be a garden - but it had to be a garden in hell."

Vreeland in her  multi-patterned living room, with layers of red,  her "garden of hell",  photographed by Horst P. Horst

Editor Pamela Fiori recently wrote in Harper's Bazaar about Richard Avedon and his muse, Audrey Hepburn. This photo was one of his many photographs during his collaboration with Vreeland.

 

The passion of red extends to other fields, including sports...and this was very apparent to me recently. At a Super Bowl party last week, a kitchen conversation, away from the TV's and the game, turned to politics, Michelle Obama and her fashion choices. There was a sharp divide on the subject of the Jason Wu flowing red organza gown she wore to the Inaugural Balls. Was it a good color for her, was it too strong, was it elegant, did she look better in white four years ago?  My opinion: I thought she looked beautiful and regal in red!

And then the sports teams themselves. This past week with football season over, my family turned its focus to Big Ten college basketball. I began to notice the red and white uniforms. First, of the Indiana Hoosiers (my son's team, so a family favorite!) then, the Wisconsin Badgers and Ohio State Buckeyes. Really, once you start looking, there's a long list of teams with red in their uniforms, from college to the pros.

National Geographic reported a study by anthropologists on the power and benefits of red in sports. It stated that, "when opponents of a game are equally matched, the team dressed in red is more likely to win."  It went on, "Across a range of sports, we find that wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning."  The feeling is that there is an intuitive, but not conscious, aspect to seeing the benefits of the strong color.

In art, color theorist Josef Albers series, Homage to the Square, he explored chromatic interaction of nesting squares. One of  his red studies

I'm a fan of the strong canvases of several artists that I work with;

Attraction, by Xanda McCagg - with an evocative name

Random Red, by  Andrea Bonfils - created with layers of encaustic wax

Cirrus Cadmium ll, by Anne Raymond - named for the red pigment

In interiors, color is used sparingly as an accent or in large doses to fill the room. Designer Jennifer Post, known for her minimalist interiors, often punctuates a space with bright color

Architectural Digest recently featured the LA home of Maroon 5's Adam Levine, beautifully filled with an art collection and mid-century furnishings. Designer Mark Haddaway used a combination of reds, from the deep rich hue of the drapes, to the pattern of the rug to accent the masculine bedroom. The oversized bright red tufted red ottoman is the visual centerpiece

Miles Redd is known for his bold use of color and often chooses red, either saturating a room in the color or in small doses of red as in this fun closet.

Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture was initially created as a holiday card for the Museum of Modern Art. The design then became a sculpture exhibited at the Indiana Museum of Art.  It has since been recreated around the world, it became a postage stamp and an iconic pop art symbol.

As a color identified with emotion and love, red has long been associated with Valentine's Day. I found it so interesting when I began to focus on the color red, I realized it was all around me: from the First Lady to fashion to interior design to art, to sports uniforms. Totally different applications, but in each, the color red, elicits emotion.

Artful Options // at the NY Gift Show

The NYIGF, the “gift show” is in NYC twice a year, filling two piers and the Jacob Javits center with merchandise. 35,0000 buyers from the US and 85 countries shop for new products in home decor, tabletop, personal accessories, kids, books & more. I’ve been attending for a number of years and look forward to catching up on what's new for the  home, particularly decorative accessories, art and artisanal products. I want to share some notable decorative art that I saw last week. For the past 15 years, Christopher Marley has been creating modern artworks from natural objects at Pheromones. His love of nature and the beauty of living and found things led him to create precise geometric artworks with these elements.

He incorporates insects, butterflies, fossils, crystals, shells & feathers into beautiful decorative pieces. His work has a geometric precision and creates visual impact on two levels, on one you have the overall shape crafted by his attention to spatial relationships, line and form.

And then you have the element itself, the insect or crystal or butterfly and its inherent beauty. Marley considers himself a storyteller because he takes the single object and crafts something bigger with his overall composition.

A favorite resource of mine for artisanal furnishings is Moderna, which features contemporary Brazilian furnishings. Roberta Schilling puts together a collection of modern furniture that represents the countries’ strong history of craftsmanship. Always supplemented with beautiful glass and ceramic pieces, this show also featured a number of terrific and different art pieces as well.

These colorful portrait paintings have great color and raw energy

A graphic collection of 20" x 20" glass squares with linear patterns creates an optical illusion, which varies depending upon the placement of the graphic works.

I especially liked this grouping of two-dimensional sculptural pieces crafted from paper in natural tones of white, grey and taupe.

Posters have been used in advertising since the early 1800‘s when printing made mass production possible. The Ross Art Group exhibits their collection of collectible vintage posters which includes many memorable and iconic images.  In the 1850's French artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec spent a great deal of time portraying the dancers at the Moulin Rouge. For income, Lautrec and other artists were hired to paint posters as advertisements for the shows.

La Goulue, Louise Weber, was the model for many of his artworks, both paintings and posters.

In the 1960's, the Artist David Klein created a group of iconic illustrated  TWA posters . Here are two favorites,

       

Andy Warhol used his famous “15 minutes” in many ways.  One of which was creating a series of four posters for Chanel in 1997, in different colors.  Warhol's pop paintings of many of the era's consumer products have become iconic images.

Another reference to fashion and design history is in a collection of prints from Dean Rhys Morgan. The London-based company has created limited edition giclee prints of drawings by various famous illustrators of the 20th century. This is a great way to acknowledge and enjoy beautifully rendered artwork that would otherwise not be seen, work that documents people, fashions, trends and places of the last century.

Tony Viramontes created graphic and vivid illustrations for many designers and magazines through the 70's and 80's. Much of his work captures the mood and energy of those years in fashion and music.

Jeremiah Goodman was an illustrator for Lord & Taylor for many years and was also known for the rooms he illustrated for the monthly covers of Interior Design magazine.

The Diana Vreeland, “Garden of Hell”  living room is wonderful,

and Sir John Gielgud's sitting room,

I highlighted several resources that I saw at the recent New York International Gift Fair (which is being rebranded this year to NY NOW, The Market for Home+Lifestyle, a more suitable name) that reflect an interest in nature and artisanal work as well as historical references in art, fashion & decor. There is a lot of overlap in these creative fields and these artists and companies are presenting products that respect and exemplify this.

The Neue Galerie // A NYC Gem

An afternoon spent walking through the collections at the Neue Galerie  was a real treat, a glimpse into another era. My daughter Alexis and I had a few hours recently and chose the small collection of Austrian And German Expressionist art in the beautifully restored Beaux Arts mansion just off Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile. The museum showcases early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design. The collection reflects the intersection of various creative disciplines at the turn of the century, the "New Art", (source of the museum's name) of this period was represented throughout Europe to capture the innovative and modern spirit that was emerging. Examples from these early days of modern design; in the decorative arts, painting, sculpture, furniture, lighting and the very new field of photography are all represented in this thoughtfully edited collection and inspired design and book stores within the museum. The collection has work from the fine artists from Vienna, including Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.

and the decorative art of early modernists, such as Wiener Werkstatte and Josef Hoffman.

In the early 1900's in Germany, the Bauhaus movement was growing and included artists like Wassily Kandily and Paul Klee and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. I have Breuer kitchen chairs based on the same tubular steel design of this bar cart and lounge.

The Neue Galerie grew out of the passions of two men who collected Modern German and Austrian art and design. Leonard Lauder, a businessman,  philanthropist and art collector and Serge Sabarsky, an art dealer and museum exhibition organizer. In 1996, after Sabarsky's death, Lauder began to create the Neue Galerie, to realize their shared vision of opening a museum for their respective collections. He bought  the former William Starr Miller House, on the corner of Fifth Ave and 86 St. Seldorf Architects renovated the mansion to appropriately display their artworks.

In 2006, Lauder purchased Gustav Klimt's 1907 gold-drenched Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer l for a record price (at the time of $135 million).  The painting is in the main floor gallery, it is really wonderful, and worth the visit to the museum.

Cafe Sabarsky, the intimate restaurant in the museum was designed to replicate the Viennese cafes at the turn of the century. The furnishings are correct for the period, light fixtures are by Josef Hoffman, furniture by Adolf Loos and the banquettes in a 1912 fabric by Otto Wagner. I began by saying the museum and cafe are a treat, a quiet and lovely space. We didn't eat here that day, but will plan to on our next visit. The museum and cafe are beautifully done, a wonderful break from the usual NY pace, an environment to feel immersed in the period it represents.

We saw the current exhibit of Ferdinand Hodler's paintings. Hodler is considered the most influential Swiss artist of the period. His landscapes are beautifully executed, and I loved how their rich colors looked on the vibrant blue walls in two of the gallery rooms.

Color was a key component to his work in his female figures - particularly blues and reds.

The museum website has photos from a number of magazine layouts that were recently photographed at the museum. How apt that the  elegant setting was used as a background for fashion and style in the 21st century. Diana Taylor, "New York's First Lady", in Harper's Bazaar, 2011, in patterned black and white, echoing the stunning grand staircase.

and from Quest Magazine, patterns and colors reflecting the detailed Klimt painting

To view the collection and the current exhibit, (Ferdinand Hodler: View to Infinity, is through January 7th) only takes a short time. Both the museum space and exhibitions provide a glimpse into a period in history that informed a lot of change in the creative arts and influenced a great deal of modern art and design.

An American artist in Paris // New works by Xanda McCagg

Artist Xanda McCagg is spending the fall in Paris, leaving her Chelsea studio to exhibit, explore and experience life in Europe for a few months. The NYC based abstract painter spent time last year in Rome and France participating in two academic residencies which I blogged about this past summer. Her time there resulted in a new body of work and Paris' Galerie Charlot's interest to exhibit her paintings.

I have known Xanda for several years and I’m drawn to the colors, and composition of her work. It evolves and yet it remains familiar as she explores the themes that drive her work.

Together we have shown her work in Bridgehampton at Comerford Collection and placed a number of pieces with new collectors, both there and privately.

I think Xanda’s paintings are familiar due to their basis in figurative work. In the exhibit overview, McCagg says, “At the core of my work is a fascination with the human experience. I consider systems of human behavior in relation to larger happenings: poverty, war, systems of control and understanding, government, and religion vs. mythology. As an artist, I observe and comment on the human condition on both a global and an intimate level....

My work continues to explore the fine line between perception and imagination of these relationships through an articulation of compositional effects. Using line and form, I determine how much or how little information is necessary to communicate these shifts. Although abstract, my work is influenced by formal principles. I use these principles both literally and metaphorically as the vocabulary with which I develop my compositions.”

Valérie Hasson-Benillouche opened the French gallery in 2010. They exhibit both new, young artists, and established European artists, exploring a mix of classical and new media.

Xanda’s work ranges in size from from 8” squares to large format paintings, up to 72"x60". Her signature remains regardless of the size.

Xanda's color range is expansive - yet knowing Xanda's work, there’s a consistency. Her palette ranges from neutrals to the use of strong colors, composed of graphite, oils and collage, in a way that the paintings are always balanced with her unique combination of line, color, texture and form.

The exhibition is October 20 -Nov 17, Galerie Charlot , 47 Rue Charlot, Paris

I wish Xanda lots of success and a great experience in Paris this fall ...

Janet Mait's Recent Paintings // on exhibition in NYC

New Shoes, a collection of vibrantly colored paintings by Janet Mait is on exhibition in a striking modern office space in Manhattan.  Janet's abstract work has been evolving since she debuted the collection at a Chelsea exhibition in Fall 2010.  Mait describes her recent paintings as, " ... more spontaneous and the brush strokes more definite. I want an unstructured and spontaneous expression on the canvas...to reflect a sense of freedom”

The Art Student's Leaguein NYC, where Mait paints, works with corporate and community spaces throughout Manhattan interested in exhibiting artwork. The artist has an opportunity to present their work in a public space and the host has the benefit of rotating exhibitions in their hallways and offices.

Squire Sanders, a global law firm is hosting the exhibition of Mait's work. The NY experience begins at Rockefeller Center,

and continues as you enter the classic Art Deco building, 30 Rockefeller Center, which opened in 1933.

The elevator opens to the entry of the sleek and modern office space, which is a great backdrop for modern art.

Mait's work lines the office's long hallway of conference rooms.

 The blue grey walls, the open space and light, all make the work stand out

The employees we spoke with enjoy having the artwork, from the halls to each of the four conference rooms.

Mait's work is about color and composition, she "thinks a lot about color combinations but so often that changes and the beginning does not dictate the end." In talking about her work and the way it has evolved, the artist likes the freedom that abstraction provides. After studying and spending time as a sculptor of bronze figures, Mait feels she can express herself  in abstraction in a way that a structured composition or sculpture doesn't allow.

The exhibition will be at Squire Sanders through October 1st.  It's an enjoyable walk through the classic NY architecture of Rockefeller Center, and a modern office space filled with Mait's lively abstract paintings - people tell me that Janet's color drenched paintings 'make them smile"!