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Kadir Nelson's "Stickballers." Image courtesy of Kadir Nelson.[/caption]
By Annette Hinkle
Why is it that so many people seem to love recalling the uncomplicated days of their youth? Maybe it’s backlash to an over-connected and complex world, or maybe it’s just that with thousands of aging baby boomers growing older every day, evoking simpler times has never been so appealing.
This weekend the Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery in Sag Harbor opens “Looking Forward Into The Past," a group exhibit that considers nostalgia in contemporary art.
The show was inspired by the work of Kadir Nelson whose paintings are dominated by African-American figures of the 1920s and ‘30s — from famous names like Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong and Joe Lewis, to portraits of everyday people dressed in their Sunday finery. But nothing says nostalgia like “Stickballers,” Mr. Nelson’s painting of boys playing on the streets of New York.
“I always aim to depict each subject with historical accuracy,” explains Mr. Nelson who was inspired by the careers of African-American painters like Ernie Barnes and Thomas Blackshear. “In ‘Stickballers’ I had to find photographs of children, cars, buildings, costuming and fire escapes from the 1920s and 1930s, and make sure they all matched up and were consistent with the time.”
He also researched the precise location in lower Manhattan where the painting is set — from the storefronts and cobblestone streets to the manhole cover used for home base, as well as the sunlight and direction of the shadows at that time of day.
“For the Manhattan Bridge itself, and the edge of the river with the buildings in the distance, the absorbent amount of time spent researching and the meticulous attention to historical detail was well worth it,” he adds.
When it comes embracing the past in his artwork, Adam Miller goes back, not decades, but centuries, to Renaissance Europe. As a
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Adam Miller's "The Finch Collectors." Image courtesy of photographer Gary Mamay.[/caption]
teenager, Mr. Miller was obsessed with Michelangelo. By the age of 16, he was studying in Italy at the Florence Academy where he learned old world drawing and painting techniques and saw the work of his Renaissance heroes first hand.
But it wasn’t the virtue in these artworks that intrigued him. Instead, he noticed that artists like Rubens and Caravaggio reveled in the unpleasant side of humanity in their imagery depicting things like beheadings, disembowelments and sexual deviancy.
“It struck me how sexual and violent these paintings were,” notes Mr. Miller. “There was something else darker and weirder going on here.”
So Mr. Miller set out to research what was happening in Rome at the time these artists worked and found that beyond the high brow artistic and cultural movements, there was a lower end of society populated by card sharks and gang members who attached themselves to the aristocrats of the city. The drinkers, gamblers, murderers and womanizers populated this kind of artwork offering a form of street art that referenced society’s seamy underbelly.
As I got into it, it all made sense,” he notes. "These paintings are about the very powerful and big issues of sex, love, money and power. These are the eternal things.”
“I found it weirdly resonant with our current cultural state,” he says.
This was the kind of work Mr. Miller decided he wanted to create — imaginative narrative paintings that, while rendered realistically, offered more than a pretty picture.
“People will say, ‘That Caravaggio is so pretty.’ But is it? The guy’s head is chopped off in a basket,” says Mr. Miller. “I didn't want to do still life and portraits. I wanted to do paintings about society, religion and politics on a massive scale.”
Now, Mr. Miller is doing exactly that, and while his large scale works reference the imaginative scenes of those Renaissance artists, they are imbibed with a decidedly 21st century sensibility. In his painting “The Intruder,” for example, a group of hunters with a vintage pickup truck have pinned a faun, a human figure with horns and goat legs, on the ground and are threatening it with their dogs and rifles.
“It’s the idea of the destruction of nature and the need to get rid of all that is not efficient and conforming,” explains Mr. Miller.
Also along those lines is his painting “Finch Collectors,” which references real life bird collector Henry Palmer who was sent to the Big Island of Hawaii in the 1800s in order to gather specimens of a rare species of bird.
“He caused the extinction of the bird by taking the sample,” notes Mr. Miller. “It’s about ambition, will power and the desire for knowledge bumping up against nature. The scientists futile attempt to go after pure truth, but filtered through human motivation.”
Like Mr. Miller, Frank Morrison, a new artist with RJD Gallery, was also inspired by the artists of Europe, though he began his career as a graffiti artist in Piscataway N.J.
“In my neighborhood, you either had to break dance, rap, or run fast,” he says. “It wasn't about what you had, it was what you could do. I could break, but I always loved to draw. Graffiti was part of that hip hop culture.”
While he always liked art, Mr. Morrison, who now lives and works in Atlanta, Ga., didn’t realize it could play a bigger role in his life until a trip to Paris when he was in high school and a dancer on tour with Sybil Lynch, a singer who had commercial success in the 1980s and ‘90s .
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"Cool Breeze" by Frank Morrison.[/caption]
“I got the call we’d be in France,” he recalls. “I had no idea my art teacher, Mrs. Moore, would give me a homework assignment. But she told me to go to the Louvre Museum.”
And it was at the Louvre that Mr. Morrison first encountered the work of artists like Rembrandt and Rafael.
“I’m 16 and my nose is almost touching the canvas,” says Mr. Morrison. “The guards are yelling at me to get back. I’m like, ‘What is this? Wow.’ You walk around the corner and get in line – and there it is — Mona Lisa.”
“I was floored by all of it,” he adds.
In the years since, graffiti has transformed into a respectable form of artistic expression and Mr. Morrison’s work has moved off of walls and onto canvases. He notes that when the British street artist Banksy was in New York last summer, he painted a piece on a building in East New York, Brooklyn where enterprising men from the neighborhood covered it up and began charging people to have a look at it.
“Banksy’s amazing. I think he helped bring new art into the street art movement,” says Mr. Morrison. “Graffiti has always been there and has always been an art form for under privileged youth to express themselves.”
And graffiti is evident in Mr. Morrison’s piece “Cool Breeze,” a painting that evokes the 1950s club scene and was inspired by Miles Davis. The work features a slinky, stylized cartoon-like trumpet player taking a cigarette break after a long night of jamming. A collection of jazz posters dominates the wall behind him.
“That’s what I feel — slinky, lanky, long notes,” he explains. “I could've painted him realistically, but it feels right. He’s a trumpet player just off his gig and taking five outside the club — and it’s not the best club.”
“It pays homage,” adds Mr. Morrison. “All these cats I grew up with don’t understand the importance of jazz, which was a rebellious art form like hip hop and punk rock. It’s about art styles pitting one against another. Can you imagine that the post-impressionists were threatening? And Van Gogh, he was crazy.”
“Looking Forward Into The Past” also features work by Teresa Elliot, Pamela Wilson, Pam Hawkes and Frank Orti. The opening reception is 6 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, July 25, 2015. The show runs through August 25, 2015 at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery, 90 Main Street, Sag Harbor. For more information call (631) 725-1161 or visit www.rjdgallery.com.
on Jul 21, 2015