Please join us for an exhibition of new work from member artist Irene Nelson (mixed media paintings) and guest artist Nancy Selvin (ceramics, courtesy of Patricia Sweetow Gallery).
October 17 – November 16, 2019
Artists’ Reception: Friday, November 1st, 6-9pm
“My work is about the dance between action and the stillness of each moment” -Irene Nelson
“With my work I attempt to maintain the ease of the unfinished.” -Nancy Selvin
When Irene Nelson first saw Nancy Selvin’s work, she realized that there was a strong visual kinship between Selvin’s massive vases and the curving forms emerging in her own abstract paintings. The two women, near contemporaries, have followed different career paths. For Nelson, painting developed out of a successful design practice from which she retired a decade ago. In contrast, Selvin has made and shown her signature arrangements of ceramic containers since the mid-‘70s, teaching and lecturing widely. But Nelson saw other common ground, as she studied Selvin’s work. Both use a kind of linear punctuation: Selvin’s flamboyant handles emerging from vases and process-related crevices and cracks, and Nelson’s drawn charcoal lines and painted black marks. Finally, both artists create rich, painterly surfaces strategically, balancing areas of visible brushwork with bare clay or solid color. The idea of an exhibition that featured both of their work intrigued Nelson. She contacted Selvin, and the rest, as they say, is history.
-Maria Porges