Nicole Maynard-Sahar: Paintings and Ceramic Reliefs
Press Release
Ranging in size from small to tiny, these abstracted landscapes are constructed of colored dots, staking out a point intriguingly between Pointillist painting and digital technologies. Textural variations within the ceramics create a shifting optical effect evoking the transitory nature of light.
The ceramics are painted with underglaze pastels covered by a glossy, clear glaze. They are pictures as well as objects; clay serves as canvas.
A white stoneware body and irregular edges connote scrimshaw - here, fused with a painter's color sensibility (imagine Bonnard painting on bone).
Such intimacy in reliefs is rare.
Pointillist dots moving through much of the work are much larger and rounder than the traditional form. Each dot is painted freehand. Unlike pixels on a flat field, each dot is a graphic moment in time and space.
Vertical bands bracket a glowing, entrancing center reminiscent of a movie screen, the theater stage, or a window. Curtains pull back to instantly reveal fresh scenery.
Maynard-Sahar’s pictures offer the viewer an emotional lift, a brain hit, as music, drama, and nature do for many people. The artworks are icons of renewal made of color.
“Nicole Maynard-Sahar: Paintings and Ceramic Reliefs” is on view from February 26 - March 23, 2013, at the Bowery Gallery, 530 W. 25th St., 4th floor, New York, NY. The public is invited to an opening reception on March 2 from 4 p.m. - 6 p.m. Each work is affordably priced at $495. For more information, please call 646.230.6655 or online: http://bowerygallery.org.
