My paintings tend to be a map of my life and my thinking, and these are what I spent my time doing during an odd time in our history.

My last show opened March 7, 2020. For many of us that was the last time we were together indoors in a large group. I treasure those memories.

Within two weeks of that opening we were under a Stay Home order to reduce the spread of Covid and in early April I began to mail out drawings, a poem, and a note to friends, family, people I wanted to thank. I sent out over 200 drawings. The Pandemic Drawing Project brought me joy and took all the creativity I had during that period.

Except for one painting, this show was created entirely in 2021. Painting during the pandemic – like a lot of things – was challenging. For me the pandemic combined with the election, the lies about vote fraud, the attack on our democracy – it was hard to turn away from the relentlessly bad and strange news. So I focused on health, family, friends, and witnessed as history unfolded around us.

Here’s how I found my way back to my work.

My studio is on Samish Island on the coast of Washington State and the Skagit Land Trust purchased a beach on Padilla Bay near my house. I started going there nearly every day at the end of my run or walk, to see what was up with the water and the sky that day. Then I bought muck boots and started to venture out onto the tidelands to have a better view of the water flowing over sand and rocks. I’m especially interested in reflections and when I’m ankle deep in water I can see more, and more interesting, reflections. Especially sky and cloud reflections.

This show began with muck boots, standing ankle deep in salt water, watching the patterns of water and ripples of fluid reflections. It brought me joy and hope.

Lisa McShane

Lisa McShane “January 6, 2021″, Oil on Linen on Wood Panel, 24″ x 40”, 2021

Lisa McShane “Beach”, Oil on Linen on Aluminum, 38″ x 54.25″ , 2021

Lisa McShane”Green Lake” Oil on Linen, 36″ x 36″, 2021

About the artist

Lisa uses layers of oil paint and glazing to capture deep waters, the pattern of waves on wet sand, and the eroded hills of the Pacific Northwest. Her paintings are abstracted, graphic, and focused on light and land and water.

In 2015 she was the Artist in Residence at Petrified Forest National Park and in 2017 was the Artist in Residence at Grand Canyon-Parshant National Monument. One of her paintings, The Sun Sets on the Slope of the Horse Heaven Hills, was on exhibit in the American Embassy in Yemen for several years and Mountains at Dusk is in the collection of the Washington State Governor’s Mansion in Olympia, Washington.

Lisa’s studio is on 15 acres of forest on Samish Island. She’s represented by Smith and Vallee Gallery in Edison, WA.

Lisa McShane

“FLUID REFLECTION”

October 1, 2021 – October 31, 2021

SMITH & VALEE GALLERY

Edison, Washington

Framing Specifications

METRO FLOATING FRAME

Deep Floating Profile: 124
Type: floating frame for 1-1/2″ deep painting
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Purchasing Option: unjoined frame cut to size with wedges
Framing Advice: Joining Wood Frames with wedges
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As the show was being hung, the virus came. Assumptions collapse into a fog, inside an unfolding unknown. Who would have imagined the immediacy of a quote like Churchill’s “Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the hard may be; for without victory there is no survival ”?
Now it’s all about the space within the house, between homes, towns, states, and countries.

When I was painting these works from 2018 to 2020, New York, the whole country was bustling with energy and life. My works were about mayhem, argumentation, celebration, all together, having a common denominator of an American air, space and light.

First, as a painter, my job is to paint the most spectacular, engaging, relevant, even overwhelming works as possible. And using iconic stories from America’s          Ur-narrative could help to re-arrange the interaction between artist and viewer away from being exclusively subjective. I wanted the subject matter to serve as the boundary lines of a game played out on an open field. With the way I had developed my style and act of painting, especially the sharp edges between reduction, abundance, action and abstraction that I had achieved over my career, I could invite the widest possible participation by many diverse viewers to feel free to participate in the game, completing my paintings for themselves.

Thinking about my work in this stark moment, it’s clear that art is almost exclusively about the power of expression and, above all, beauty. I hope all my work powerfully expresses my sentiments in beautiful forms that can give pleasure to people.

John Bradford 2020

Mayflower November 11, 1620, 2019
acrylic, oil on canvas
48 x 60 in

Washington Returns to Mount Vernon, 2019
acrylic, oil on canvas
48 x 60 in

Plymouth Rock, 2019
acrylic, oil on canvas
48 x 72 in

About the artist

JOHN BRADFORD (b. 1949, Wilmington, Delaware) received his BFA from Cooper Union in 1971 and MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1979. He is the 2011 recipient of prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Painting. John Bradford’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtNews, Village Voice, the Jewish Press and Hudson Review.

JOHN BRADFORD

By Land and By Sea

by appointment only

(Originally Scheduled for February 27 – April 25, 2020)

Anna Zorina Gallery New York, NY

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS

METRO FLOATING FRAME

Profile: 120 & Profile: 124
Type: floating frame for 1-1/2″ deep paintings & 2-1/4” deep paintings
Wood & Finish: unfinished maple
Purchasing Option: cut to size with wedges

Light is the main element in my paintings. I use layers of oil paint and resin, usually over linen, to create deeply luminous paintings of light and the way it falls on land and water. I want my work to breathe and to convey the beauty of our world, though I don’t paint an untouched landscape. I paint a world that includes the impact we have on our lands.

In the west our world is increasingly altered by wildfire smoke and I work to capture that: the strange filter that a blanket of smoke casts on the land that changes the way we see color, bonfires near dry trees, strangely vivid suns and moons, and smoke pouring off a distant forest. Fire moves fast. It’s changing the west in late summer and I’m painting those impacts.

My work is increasingly abstracted. I find I have less to say about specific places, and more to convey about the embrace of light on landscapes, whether I’m looking down at a reflection on a river or at a wide horizon line. I rarely paint onsite; I want distance from the experience so that I can engage my memory and my mind. My images often start with a photo, then are abstracted through rough sketches, then drawings, and finally, the painting.

Okanagan: Fire on the Horizon, 2020, Oil on Linen Panel, 26” x 42”

“Lhaq’te’mish: Morning Fog” on the Nooksack Delta, 2020,
Oil on Linen over Wood Panel, 30” x 20”

“Yakama: Autumn on the River”, Oil on Linen over Aluminum, 20” x 24”

LISA MCSHANE
March 6, 2020 – March 29, 2020
Smith and Vallee Art Gallery
Edison, WA

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS

METRO FLOATING FRAME

Profile: 124 Profile: 121
Type: floating frame for 1-1/2″ deep paintings
Wood & Finish: ash various finishes
Purchasing Option: cut to size with wedges

WORDS is the artist’s investigation into the impact of globalization and its effect on key human structures of language, society, culture, and environment. In each country, Dailey set up his camera with green-screen backdrop and invited random individuals.  Participants were asked 13 words in their native languages: peace, war, love, environment, freedom, religion, democracy, government, happiness, socialism, capitalism, future, and United States.  Each person responded—in a single word—with a first impression and selected a background flag reflecting his or her societal allegiance.  WORDS MULTIMEDIA is a time-based art and engages the viewers in present day issues while invoking a communal sense among global citizens.  In WORDS on WORDS, distinct single-word responses are layered in an immeasurable array of colors enhanced by the lenticular 3D effect. Interjecting his voice in a collaborative manner with the project’s participants, Dailey creates iconoclastic yet playful statements reminiscent of Dada and Surrealist word play.

About the artist

Born 1951 in California, Brian Dailey earned MFA from Otis Art Institute in 1975 and Ph.D. from University of Southern California in 1987 and participated in the pioneering creative experimentation defining the prolific artistic milieu in California in this era.  His early career launched him on a path that—before his full circle back to his arts in 2008—took him through a twenty-year interlude working on arms control and international security.  These unusual experiences were a fertile source of inspiration in his idiosyncratic art practice. With dual citizenship of USA and New Zealand, He lives and works in the Washington D.C. and in Woodstock, Virginia.  His selected solo exhibitions include at Katzen Arts Center, American University Museum in Washington D.C., in 2018 and his mid-career retrospective at Bulgaria’s National Art Gallery in Sofia in 2014. The evocative videoJIKAI was screened on multiple synchronized monitors in New York City in February, 2014, as the featured video in the Times Square Midnight Moment series; a project of ART PRODUCTION FUND. Brian Dailey is represented by Baahng Gallery.

Brian Dailey

WORDS: A Global Conversation

February 11 – March 17, 2020

Baahng & Co New York City, NY

Framing Specifications

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Profile: 101
Type: Standard Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple frame with painted dolphin finish
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame
Custom Wood Spacer: 1/2″ wood frame spacer
Custom Wood Strainer: 3/4″ wood frame strainer

Dave Shafer’s photographic art work is strongly rooted in Americana themes, adventures and totems. The images for this exhibit have all be captured with film and a 50+ year old 4×5 format camera. No matter the camera or subject, Dave’s devotion is to capture the fleeting moments of gesture and light.

Cowboy Boot No. 2, 2019 4″ x 5″ archival pigment ink in acrylic – photograph reverse gilding with gold leaf

Sombrero, 2015 24″ x20″ archival pigment ink – Photograph Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 100% Cotton/Acid-Lignin Free

Cattle, 2015 24″ x20″ archival pigment ink – Photograph Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 100% Cotton/Acid-Lignin Free

Napping Cowboy 24″ x20″ archival pigment ink – Photograph Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 100% Cotton/Acid-Lignin Free

About the artist

Born and raised in the hard working steel country of Western Pennsylvania, his father at an early age introduced Dave to the camera and magic of the darkroom.

For 20 plus years his eye has been focused on commercial, advertising and magazine editorial pursuits. Dave has been recognized with some of the most prestigious awards in the industry, including two Communication Arts – Award of Excellence and just recently a Gold Medal from the International Regional Magazine Association

Dave Shafer 

“Through an Artist’s Lens”

February 29, 2020 – April 25, 2020

Davis and Blevins Gallery

St. Jo, Texas

Framing Specifications

NIELSEN METAL GALLERY FRAME

Profile: 117
Finish: black
Finish: white
Custom Frame Mat: 8 ply white museum mat
Custom Cut Matboard: 8 ply white museum matboard
Custom Frame Custom Frame Acrylic: 1/8″ UV acrylic cut to size

ETHER Arts Project, an international nomadic cultural organization that links artists, curators and exhibition spaces, has invited Tania Dibbs to participate with a solo project booth at this premier art fair. With a strong focus on environmental art, which responds to ETHER’s mission, the display includes works from Tania’s Arctic series and her most recent endeavor, The Ripple Effect series, which emphasizes the dynamic between personal choices and collective impact. “It is important to understand that every action that we take and every decision that we make has a consequence. The only way to look into the future is by thinking in the present, even if only by raising the level of consciousness and discourse which is valuable in itself.” the artist commented.

Scramble, 36″ x 48″ acrylic

Melt 60″ x 84″ mixed media on canvas

About the artist

Tania Dibbs is an accomplished mid-career artist originally from Washington D.C., who has been living in Aspen, Colorado, since the 1980’s. With a degree in Biology and Fine Arts, her work explores the jagged intersection between the natural world, humanity and culture through painting and sculpture. She was a pioneer artist in exploring the Anthropocene Era, focusing on the effects of man on the environment with her successful Anthropocene series which she released in 2015. The screens and overlays that she painted over her scenes both highlighted and obscured the masterfully created landscapes beneath, speaking to the beauty of nature as well as to the conflicting yet fantastic constructs of man.

Her work is present in several international collections and she has been recognized with numerous awards, amongst which stand out a residency she did in 2016 in the Arctic Circle.

Tania Dibbs
Art Palm Springs 2020
February 13, 2020 – February 17, 2020
Palm Springs, CA

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS

METRO FLOATING FRAME

Profile: 120 and Profile: 121
Type: floating frame for 1-1/2″ and 2-1/4″  deep paintings
Wood & Finish: ash unfinished  and black lacquer on ash
Purchasing Option: joined frame

Front Room Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of photographs by Stephen Mallon. “Passing Freight” is a visual celebration of the unique beauty and function of freight train cars in United States. In 2018 there were 1,637,000 freight cars in operation across North America, each distinctive in their construction, markings and utility. Time and human contact add to each train car’s individuality: all carrying a vast, and sometimes surprising array of goods and resources. This series of photographs captures the still active rail lines that carry freight to destinations across the country. Mallon’s industrial landscape photographs isolate freight cars within this iconic transportation system, which has played a critical role in supply infrastructure across the continent for hundreds of years.

Mallon has been finding locations from New York to California, patiently waiting for the combination of light, subject and environment to capture unique images where they intersect. He has chosen the “decisive moment” to capture these speeding boxcars photographically. There is an intersection of mechanical and natural worlds, singular encounters where the trains activate the landscape, which for Mallon are fleeting and hard to predict. Patience leads to the essential moment when these elements come into position: the points in time where the colors and shapes of each railcar, all of the nuances of the light reflecting from the loads of steel, wood, and everything else are composed and captured.

copyright  Stephen Mallon Images courtesy of Stephen Mallon & Front Room Gallery

About the artist

Stephen Mallon is a photographer and filmmaker who specializes in the industrial-scale creations of mankind at unusual moments of their life cycles. Mallon’s work blurs the line between documentary and fine art, revealing the industrial landscape to be unnatural, desolate and functional yet simultaneously also human, surprising and inspiring. Mallon’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, and his work has been written about in many publications, including National Geographic, The New Yorker, New York Times, Vanity Fair, Wired, Stern, PetaPixel, Viral Forest, BuzzFeed, New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, and featured on CNN, CBS, MSNBC and NPR.
STEPHEN MALLON

PASSING FREIGHT

February 13 – March 15, 2020

Front Room Gallery

New York, NY

copyright  Stephen Mallon Images courtesy of Stephen Mallon & Front Room Gallery

Framing Specifications

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Profile: 106
Type: Standard Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple frame with pickled white finish
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame
Custom Wood Spacer: 1/4″ wood frame spacer
Custom Wood Strainer: 1/2″ wood frame strainer
Custom Frame Acrylic: 1/8″ acrylic cut to size

Lowlands is an exhibition of new work that reflects my relationship to a very specific place.  Though specific in my mind, the lowlands of my backyard are not unlike a thousand various other swampy places throughout Interior Alaska. These are not the lands of the Alaskan tourist brochure – they are cold in the winter, wet in the summer, unmanageable for building, mosquito-filled, and visually relentless in their endless forests of stunted trees. It is not the easiest landscape to love. Luckily, I’ve never equated love with ease or perfection. I believe that in nature there is brutality, misshapenness, a degree of loneliness, and that the natural world does not bend to accommodate us. This is particularly true in the lowlands.

The basins of spruce and swamp between the mountains are places of enormous beauty. Every tree that grows on the inhospitable permafrost takes a unique shape. The muskeg is home to an infinite variety of small plant forms, grasses, berries and surprising creatures. Waterways surge with overflow even in the coldest weather, foiling travel and creating evolving ice sculptures. Over the years, I’ve seen animal life in my backyard ranging from bear to muskrat, shrew to sandhill crane. I’ve had the disorienting pleasure of being lost on my own land. I think it is a place that puts up with my presence, but barely. It can hinder my control in a thousand ways, which somehow seems only fair.

​These lowlands are also the context for human lives, some settling here by choice and others due to economic necessity. A lack of building codes and a tradition of do-it-yourself leads to both unique and often inadequate or dangerous structures. In the lowlands, we give each other space and don’t ask too many questions of our neighbors. Between the trails and dog teams and tidy log homes are drugs and darkness, mistreatment, abandoned dreams, junkyards and guns. This place is made of all these things at the same time – beauty, difficulty, occasionally desperation. Through my work, I attempt to get beneath Alaska’s overly edited myths to try and understand the whole.

About the artist

I make art out of compulsion, curiosity, and my love of process. I learn through the act of making, and this passion for discovery is integral to who I am. The things I make often speak for me. Art allows me to be in places and with people and, hopefully, to talk across space and time. My work is an opportunity to know materials and to develop mastery.

Sara Tabbert is a printmaker and mixed media artist from Fairbanks, Alaska. With an MFA in printmaking from University of Nebraska – Lincoln, her love of woodblock printing has led to the creation of carved, painted wooden panels. In addition to smaller work, Tabbert’s large-scale public art commissions can be found throughout Alaska. Her work is housed in public collections through the state and far beyond.

Sara Tabbert

“Lowlands”

February 7, 2020 – April 4, 2020

Alaska State Museum

Juneau, Alaska

Framing Specifications

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Profile: 106
Type: Standard Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple frames with clear water based finish
Purchasing Option: cut to size with wedges
Custom Frame Acrylic:  1/8″ regular acrylic cut to size
Custom Frame mat: 4 ply white museum mat
Custom Cut Matboard: 4 ply white museum board cut to size
Custom Frame backing: acid free foamboard cut to size

METRO FLOATING FRAME

Deep Floating Profile: 122
Type: floating frame for 3/4″ deep artwork
Wood & Finish:  maple with clear water based finish
Purchasing Option: chopped with wedges
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Connally works most clearly with what we recognize as gestural abstraction, associated with Abstract Expressionism. Connally has focused, however, on a notable subset of such gestural painting, one recognized in the heyday of Action Painting and even cited then to link Abstract Expressionism with vital precedents (e.g. the late Impressionism of Monet, the early abstractions of Kandinsky). Like such precedents, Connally distinguishes herself as, in essence, a landscape painter, albeit one who paints the landscape she feels as much as she paints the one she sees. Indeed, Connally’s stress on sensuous form and color experience through reference to natural phenomena (in particular vegetation and water, normally in motion) places itself squarely in a tradition particular to the American experience. John Marin’s expansive rhapsodies on the local landscape exemplify this tradition, as does Joan Mitchell’s gradual – but ultimately thorough – adoption of landscape qualities and references. This sort of “plein air abstraction” defines Connally’s work, but her particular touch and palette, and her close and vibrant sense of atmosphere, distinguishes it.

Peter Frank, LA Art Critic

Connie Connally, Tigers on the River Bank, 2019, oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches

Connie Connally Windflower II 2019 30×30 oil on canvas

Connie Connally, Rose Garden, oil on canvas,30 x 30 inches

About the artist

Connie Connally paints stunning canvases of complex elegance, with imagery that merges harmoniously and nearly completely both representational reference and powerful abstraction. Connally’s poetic colorscapes, with their expressive brushwork, sweeping gestural marks and animated cadence, reflect the artist’s passion for distilling the essence of her observations of nature and situate her work as the vital interplay between memory and imagination. Her palette of organic color and calligraphic brushstroke combine to serve as imprint of the artist’s profound love of being in nature and the desire that her painting reflect both her exterior and interior experience of it.

Citing Joan Mitchell as an important influence on her work, Connally employs exuberant, impassioned colors laid on her canvases in a pictorial strategy that teeters between the action painting of her abstract expressionist forebears and a more refined personal style that modulates the strokes and dabs that comprise her surfaces. Her layers of brushstroke read less as agitated ruptures and more like intuitive, sensual experiences rendered as prismatic atmospheres of color and tone. Rich, multi-layered surfaces of color morph, coalesce and scatter in quietly energetic rhythms that evoke the experience of being surrounded by nature.

Connie Connally

Wild By Nature

January 11, 2020 – February 15, 2020

George Billis Gallery

Los Angeles, CA

Framing Specifications

METRO FLOATING FRAME

Deep Floating Profile: 121
Type: floating frame for 1-1/2″ deep painting
Wood & Finish: unfinished maple
Purchasing Option: joined frame
Framing Advice: Fitting Floating Frames

Beautiful and seductive, these landscapes contain, but only partially conceal, a visceral howl. My understanding of them fluctuates between seeing them as landscapes, then as abstractions, and finally again as landscapes….What I love most is the time it takes to truly absorb and appreciate their structure and beauty. For me, that is a slow and delightfully rewarding experience. – Bill Scott

Ying Li, Cherry Blossom, Oil on linen, 36 x 36 inches

Ying Li, Grassy Waters #1, Oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches

Ying Li, Wintry Garden, Oil on linen, 24 x 48 inches

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Beijing, China, Ying Li studied painting at Anhui Teachers University where she was later an instructor. She immigrated to the United States in 1983 and received an MFA from Parsons School of Design. Li’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including internationally at Centro Incontri Umani Ascona (Switzerland), ISA Gallery (Italy), Enterprise Gallery (Ireland), and Museum of Rochefort-en-Terre (France); in New York City at Lohin Geduld Gallery, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, The National Academy Museum, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters; also, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery (Haverford College), the James Michener Museum in Doylestown, and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College.

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS

Ying Li The Secret Garden, Insects and Butterflies, oil on linen, 16 x 16 inches

METRO FLOATING FRAME

Profile: 121 and 122
Type: floating frame for 3/4″ and 1 1/2″ deep paintings
Wood & Finish: maple clear finish with pickled white finish
Purchasing Option: joined frame