News, Workshops & Events

WINTER GALLERY NEWS

January - March

With any luck, we hope to have our new and improved website up sometime this winter. It's a little bit of a facelift and some needed housekeeping, esp. the inclusion of larger images for ALL the thumbnail images online. We also expect to introduce a blog to allow more give-and-take with our collectors.

In the meantime, please stop by the gallery to see our most recent large installation: "Woodland Glade - Homage to Seurat." It's a four-panel polyptych of one single image printed with pigmented ink on canvas. Each panel measures 40" x 60" so the overall size of the polyptych is ten feet wide by seven feet high. We subtitled the piece: "Homage to Seurat" after the pointillist painter of the 18th century Georges-Pierre Seurat whose method of painting was using small colored dots of paint to provide an overall image (most famously: "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte").

When we enlarged the original photo (a 35mm slide) to the size now displayed, the integrity of the image, as a literal photograph, began to deteriorate. Rather than viewing this as a problem, we were pleased to oversharpen the image to create an even greater breakdown, thereby moving the image even farther from the literal. For some time now, we have been speaking with collectors about the nature of these images as more than a document of the beautiful area from which they were taken. We like to think that the most successful images from our portfolio transcend the literal scene and become, like a Seurat painting, greater than the sum of it's components -- whether it's colored dots, in the case of Seurat, or line, form and color in the case of an image like "Woodland Glade."

On a related note, this fall we were pleased and honored to prepare and hang an even larger five-panel polyptych in the Humanities Building at the invitation of the University. Working with Peter Brown at SUNY, we selected a panoramic image from our portfolio: "Spring Orchard, Skytop" and printed it using pigmented ink on five 40" x 56" canvas panels. The final work measures almost 17 feet wide. We had the finished panels on temporary display at the gallery prior to their installation and had an interesting chat with a visitor about the use of discrete panels for large scenics, esp. among Japanese painters. She noted that one of the goals of certain Japanese artists was to create panels that, although part of a larger scene, could stand on their own as works of art and she noted that the five-panels in the gallery seemed to meet that test as well. We hope you'll stop by the Humanties Building if you are on the SUNY/New Paltz campus to view the finished installation just inside the main entrance, adjacent to the Faculty Tower.

Jordan Gallery 845-255-6800.