Joe Concra's "Hopscotch," 2011, 74" x 82" oil on canvas
By Annette Hinkle
Memory and emotion are powerful triggers when it comes to connecting with artwork. Why certain paintings strike a chord in viewers is anyone’s guess. Does it come from the deepest recesses of childhood? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s a connection to something intangible, like the first scent of spring on a dreary March day.
Finding a personal story within the frame makes for a potent bond between art and viewer, and fans of the Richard J. Demato Gallery (90 Main Street, Sag Harbor) know the gallery typically presents work that is complex, surreal and full of narrative possibilities.
Demato’s first show of the year is no exception. Entitled “2012, The Day After,” it opens Saturday, January 7, 2012 with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and features work by Xiaolu Zhang, Joe Concra, Michael Carson and Ben Hengst.
As a painter, Joe Concra has gone through a number of incarnations. He first picked up a brush in college (though he had a scholarship to study journalism) and never looked back. From an 18-year-old doing abstraction — “Because it was easy,” he says. “It looks like art!” — he morphed into landscape painting and has since arrived at a unique style that may just reveal a little of everyplace he’s been as an artist.
His recent work offers an intriguing use of imagery and the emotion of nostalgia. Take some circus characters, juxtapose them with an element of the unexpected, add a dose of stark landscape and you’ve got paintings that definitely tell a story. But with Concra’s work, it’s up to the viewer to fill in the blanks.
First there’s emotion. Who can resist a forlorn little elephant sitting in a puddle having been forgotten when the circus left town? Then there’s the threatening — a painted face with a conical hat leering menacingly from the open hatch of tank. There’s even the mysterious in the form of a clown lying unconscious — perhaps at the scene of a crime — the soles of his oversized shoes and his bulky fluffy-buttoned belly are all we can see.
“Every painting informs the next painting,” says Concra. “Usually I take something from the one that came before and that ushers me to the next one. Sometimes it’s a great leap, and sometimes those leaps are small steps.”
“I work every day, and like other artists, the floor is littered with the things that didn’t work,” he admits.
Concra and his wife, Denise Orzo, also an artist, live and work in Kingston, N.Y in the foothills of the Catskills Mountains. It’s an area that played a big role in Concra’s evolution as a landscape painter, but only after he discovered a book on the Hudson River School of landscape painting.
“I actually lived here in high school and never noticed that all this beauty was around me,” he says. “But then I began exploring landscape and sense of place.”
“That gave way to different imagery, fence posts and odd things,” says Concra of his work. “There was a story about a guy who left from Philly in a hot air balloon and crashed in the Catskills. I began painting air balloons crashing. One thing led to the next, and I came upon these circus animals and clowns where I am now.”
“Lately I’ve been painting safety cones,” he adds. “I’m honing in on imagery and going forward. The clown’s hat became the safety cone. Each shape and color leads to the next thing.”
While in their day the Hudson River School artists strived to present the most realistic view of the world they could, Concra finds that today, with so many competing images, for him the work is about imagination.
“I think my role is to get viewers to stand in front of a painting more than half a minute,” he says. “I know how much I love looking at paintings. What I love is when people come in a gallery and see something they haven’t seen before and it challenges them.”
“I think if you can challenge a viewer to stand in front of a painting, then you’re doing something great,” he adds. “To make them stop and really look, then I think I’ve done my job.”
Concra’s job involves juxtaposing imagery so his work offers viewers enough to strike a chord, but not so much that it fills in the blanks. It’s a balance that truly blends the realism of landscape painting with deep seated memories of the mind.
“It’s all imagination starting from the standpoint of the elephant left behind after the circus has gone,” explains Concra. “I think there’s a narrative and some other things I’m trying to say and don’t say aloud. I let people come to it through their own thoughts and ideas – and let them arrive at their own decision.”
“It comes from a very emotional place – humor, sadness and celebration,” he adds. “Little toys, childhood stuffed animals. Those inanimate objects have so much energy.”
The realism of landscape is also present in the way in which Concra portrays his subjects’ surroundings — much of it inspired by the fields, waterways and paths he encounters as an avid cyclist out on the road.
But that real world is welcome only so far into Concra’s paintings. Though he has great views of the mountains from his home, Concra isn’t gazing out the window for inspiration.
“I keep the blinds drawn in my studio,” he admits.
Xiaolu Zhang's "New Girlfriend # 4," Mixed media on canvas, 55 x 40", 2011
Like Concra, painter Xiaolu Zhang combines elements of abstraction and the figurative in her art. The Chinese-born artist is a masters degree student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and her paintings offer a unique vision of blurred genders and commentary on male and female societal expectations. For Zhang, the work represents a major shift from what was expected of her, not only as a woman, but as an artist in China.
“My painting history is a little complicated, because I started with Chinese painting which is traditional and conservative,” she explains. “The way they face the world is very neutral and the colors they use are very neutral. Even though I wanted to use bright colors, no other students were doing it, and it was not accepted by the professors.”
But once she came the U.S., Zhang felt free to expand her palette and her direction.
“I started to change to the abstract and use many colors in ways I didn’t try before,” she says. “After experiments with the abstract, I really felt my style. I think it was with me for a long time and now I don’t want to give it up.”
“I use a lot of bright, artificial colors and emphasize the sense of self appearance – it’s kind of foppish,” she says of her work. “It presents the reality of the world in my eyes or in anyone eyes. That’s how I feel color works. Because they are really bright and pretty, like fireworks, they also could disappear very soon.”
