Our Bethesda shows for 2003

The award winning infrared photographic work of Catriona Fraser, part one of her "Seven Celtic Nations Project." Art critic J.W. Mahoney wrote about Fraser's work in the Washington Review: "The single eye of Catriona Fraser's camera has been directed toward the timeless world of her Celtic ancestors for many years now, and, even as the infrared film she uses is expressively sensitive to heat, the quality of the light in all her pictures saturates the spaces she photographs with an unforgettably intense aura of the holy." Critic Ferdinand Protzman in the Washington Post called her work "brooding and evocative." See more works by Fraser here.Please join us on Friday, January 10 from 6pm - 10pm for the Bethesda Art Walk.

Etchings, woodcuts, linocuts, wood engravings, monotypes and lithos by a variety of American, Asian, Latin American and European printmakers. Work by Niurka Inurrieta, Grant Silverstein, Ellen Winkler, Marius Martinescu, John Jacobsmeyer, Foust, Caroline Danforth, Michelle O'Patick, Art Werger, Elise Nicol, Lee Newman, Jenny Freestone, Ann Zahn and others. An opening reception for all exhibiting printmakers was held on Friday, February 14 from 6-10 PM.

Our annual worldwide call for photographers. Juried and curated by Philip Brookman, Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. This competition is designed to showcase the best and brightest of new, emerging photographers in a worldwide call for submissions. An opening reception for all accepted photographers was held on Friday, March 14 from 6-10 PM and around 400 people attended the four hour reception. Click here to see all the accepted entries and also read the Washington Post review here.

Friday, April 25, 2003
6:30 - 7:30 PM
Author Margaret Paris discussed Embracing America: A Cuban Exile Comes of Age, a touching tale and the life story of Elena Maza, daughter of poet Olga Caturla de la Maza. Paris shared the story of the exiled Cuban family's survival and adaptation to life in the U.S. during the social movements of the 60's, 70's and 80's. Booksigning will follow immediately after the discussion.

Friday, April 25, 2003
7:30 - 8:30 PM
"Poetry of Two Worlds." Artist Elena Maza, read and discussed her mother's book "All the Sea for my Dreams" by Olga Caturla de la Maza. This is a bilingual collection of poems that expresses a nostalgia for the homeland, love of nature and the harmonization of past and present.

Saturday, April 26, 2003
1:00 - 2:30 PM
Author Ori Soltes discusses his book Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters of the 20th Century. An account of the profound impact of Jewish-American painters during the 20th century.

Saturday, April 26, 2003
5 - 6:30 PM
Photographer Danny Conant discussed her new book Tibetian Journey, a book of intimate photographs which capture the natural beauty of Tibet and its people.

Sunday, April 27, 2003
1:30 - 3:00 PM
Joyce Tenneson discussed and then signed copies of her new book Flower Portraits: The Lifecycle of Beauty. Tenneson is one of the most respected and influential contemporary photographers in the world and this, her 8th book, captures the undiscovered beauty of flowers at the end cycle of their life.

"Joyce Tenneson Discussing Her New Book"

The Fraser Gallery of Bethesda is proud to host the solo debut of young Maryland painter Andrew Wodzianski, a recent graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). This young artist's works first came to our attention through one of our annual student shows, where both his subject imagery and technical skill immediately set him apart from the others. Read the Washington Post's review of this show here and the Washington Times' review here.

Around six and a half feet in height, Wodzianski seems to translate his stature to his paintings, both in size and scope. Working in huge canvases, he focuses on bringing ancient stories and legends to an odd contemporary setting, with the artist himself often playing many of the peculiar narrative scenes depicted in his paintings.

In “Jacob,” Wodzianski both interprets and plays the role of the eponymous ancestor of the 12 tribes of Israel. It is written that on the banks of the Jabbok, Jacob wrestled with an angel and received the name of Israel, but on the canvas of Wodzianski, the artist is Jacob, as a weirdly costumed, skinny giant, applying a knock-out punch to a buckle-shoed boxer, while a Mexican-masked wrestler, atop a divan chair, calls the match.

The biblical stories, Roman, and Greek myths from which Wodzianski borrows his themes have supplied artists with subject matter for centuries; however, in his unique interpretations, Andrew Wodzianski places them within a new, fresh dialogue that continues to affirm the importance of painting in contemporary art. A reception for the artist was held on Friday, April 11 from 6-10 PM. Wodzianski writes about his work:

tableau vivant - literally a "living picture"; a representation of a personage, character, scene, incident, etc., or of a well-known painting or statue, by one person or a group of people in suitable costumes and attitudes, silent and motionless.

"My own hybrid of tableaux presents a vision of personalized mythologies, reinvented religions and twisted archetypes. As a painter, I create a contrived world, populated by costumed reflections of me. Environmentally bleak, the world is conceived as a stage; the stage is translated into a painting. That painting relies on control. In directing the subject, process, and medium, no variable is left unattended.

Manipulating a painting’s origin is a meticulous affair. With script in mind, I hunt for specific props, costumes, and lights. Once in possession of this material, I begin documentation. The choreography of characters on my sets is a director’s passion. Choosing to condense a performance into a single image proves to be the ideal vehicle for expressing my interests. Still images are compiled and collaged into a final composition. Once drawn on canvas, the physical act of painting begins.

On a narrative level, each painting illustrates a mythological story or religious allegory. Aided by the weight of art history, I offer my own contributions to morality plays. Because they are interpretations, I take the liberty of addressing themes that may not be contained within the original tale. Each character is an ironic, or satirical permutation of classical iconography. My own images play the various roles; these roles in turn substitute for the portrayal of a fractured, conflicted self. Self-abasement is repetitive. Disguise and metamorphosis are prevalent. Each environment is another perspective of an artist’s studio, where the craftsman embraces alienation and obsesses on surreal fantasies. Although my final medium is paint, the underbelly of theater and cinema greatly influence my vision. I consider myself a piecemeal image-maker, created by Dr. Frankenstein: part vaudeville stage manager, part burlesque-house operator, part pornography film casting agent, and part B-horror movie director. My monstrous, unwavering motive is to marry the ludicrously tragic with the tragically ludicrous."

Flower Photography by Andrzej Pluta. The photographer was born in Poland in 1950 and lives in Canada. His unique photographic works are in many private, public and Royal art collections worldwide. He immigrated to Canada in 1971, where he currently resides. Pluta's photographs were recently featured in "Border Crossings" art magazine.

His unique work is created by using Sinar P2 8x10 inch cameras. For some compositions, Carl Zeiss Mirotar lens (one of the world’s rarest) is used on the Sinar 8x10, making it the only camera construction of its kind. Using a unconventional and complex lighting technique, the full frame image is exposed on 8x10 Fujichrome film. There is no darkroom or computer manipulation and no retouching of the original color transparency which then yield a final archival-quality hand-printed Cibachrome print.

The term "Ciba" comes from Ciba-Geigy, a Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical company that developed the type of dyes used in this process. Also called "azo" dyes, these are the most brilliant and long-lasting colors available in a direct photographic print process. Unlike other color print processes, where the dyes are added during the paper processing, Cibachrome® paper is manufactured with the azo dyes impregnated in the paper itself. Unwanted dyes are bleached away during the paper processing (called "dye bleach reversal") rendering the final print a beautiful archival work. The fact that the dyes are in the paper itself also means that when the exposure is made by the enlarger, there is virtually no "light scattering" which results in sharpness loss.

Pluta's Cibachrome® prints deliver exceptional color fidelity, sharpness and brilliance and are in many public and private collections around the world. He has married the brilliant colors delivered by the process with an elegant subject matter of wildflowers, cultivated flowers and other organic subject matter to deliver singularly beautiful prints. A reception was held on Friday, May 9 from 6-10 PM. More images can be seen online here. Read the Washington City Paper review by Louis Jacobson here.

A group exhibition of figurative paintings by artists represented by the Fraser Gallery including new work by Chawky Frenn, John Winslow, Caroline Danforth, Scott Hutchison, Julie Shelton-Smith, Helen Bayley, David FeBland, Andrew Wodzianski, Margaret McGann, Brad Rudich, Priscilla Young, Tristan Schane, Sheila Giolitti, John Jacobsmeyer, Renee McGinnis, Katie Kaufman, Jackie Saunders, Jamie Wimberly, Seth Cohen and others. The opening reception took place on Friday, June 13 from 6pm - 10pm and this show was selected as the weekend visual art pick by the Washington Post.

Working with Cuban and Cuban-American curators both in the US and abroad, the Fraser Gallery hosts a survey of Cuban artists from Cuba, from the Cuban Diaspora around the world and American artists of Cuban ancestry. The opening reception was held on Friday, September 12. Exhibiting artists include Sandra Ramos, Aimeé García Marrero, Elsa Mora, Roberto Acosta Wong, Nestor Hernandez, Pedro Betancourt Montalvo, Jacqueline Zerquera Tejedor, Niurka Iñurrieta, Deborah Nofret Marrero, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Elena Maza, Augusto Bordelois, Andres Tremols and Andres Besse Montoya.

John Winslow studied art at Princeton and then received his BFA and MFA from Yale School of Art. Winslow recently retired after many years as a Professor of Art at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He had also taught at the Corcoran School of Art and the Yale School of Art.

Among Winslow's many awards, he won the 1996 Individual grant-in-aid in painting from The Commission on the Arts and Humanities of the District of Columbia, the 1995 Annual Awards Exhibition, The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City and he also received the 1994 Award given by Donald Kuspit for the painting Venus de Milo in the exhibition "Painting 94." As a young artist he also won the 1964 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in Painting.

Winslow has exhibited worldwide, including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brookyln Museum, the High Museum in Atlanta, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio Texas, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Milwaukee Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in DC, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Conn. and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

Winslow's works have been reviewed widely, including reviews in Art in America, Washington Post, Washington Times, and the Washington Review. An opening reception for the artist was held on Friday, October 10, from 6-10 PM and an artist's talk was given at 7:20 PM.

Winslow has written about this show:

"For quite a while now I’ve been painting pictures that look like they might be scenes from a theatrical production or performance of some kind. You’re given a platform with actors assuming staged poses, set off against a painted backdrop or scrim (usually a photographic-looking meta-scene). The background scenes in this exhibit generally fall into three catagories: the Wright brothers exploits at Kill Devil Hills, man made disaster and destruction, or woodland landscapes. The cast of characters includes dancers, gymnasts, dreamers, aeronauts, the people that you see around you every day, and often the artist/director/me. But the subject of the paintings, in my mind, is not the activity of the players nor the illusionistic background, but rather what comes out of the interaction of the two - the figure-ground tension. My format provides opportunities for creating a press and release of space about the figures, and the jumps in scale and juxtaposition of disparate colors, forms and moods which one usually associates with collage. When it works, the paintings tell a new, visual story."

Read the ArtlinePlus review by John Haslem and the Washington Times Hot Pick and a review by Dr. Claudia Rousseau in the Gazette.

The Fraser Gallery Bethesda hosted a showing of new paintings by two exciting young and talented Washington area painters: Scott Hutchison and Caroline Danforth on exhibition at Fraser Bethesda from November 14 through December 10, 2003. The opening reception was held on Friday, November 14, 2003. Read the review in the Washington Post Express here. The show was also discussed and reviewed by WJLA TV as part of the Channel 7 News. Read the article published in the Gazette here and the piece in the Georgetowner by John Blee here.

About the Artists: We live in world where artists, often pushed towards and brainwashed by what is "new" rather than what is good, are seduced by technology, gimmick and shock to eschew artistic integrity, technical skill, vision and individual creativity. And yet, somehow, many, many young artists are still driven by the same artistic fires that drove their ancestors to paint, and to draw and to try to re-create on canvas or paper what lives in their minds, feelings and experiences drives their personal ideas, and what fuels their own vision of what is "new" and what is art. Two such young artists are Danforth and Hutchison, who work together as two individual artists.

Caroline Danforth recently finished her BA at Mary Washington College and has now commenced her Master's studies at George Washington University. Danforth's works have already created a significant impression locally driven by Danforth's facility with paint and her work has already been acquired by many important collectors in the US and Europe and she has become one of the Fraser Gallery's best-selling artists and even though still a student, she has already developed a secondary art market record. Still in her 20's, she's considered by many to be one of the brighest and most promising young painters in our area. On exhibit at the gallery are two dozen original small oils on wood, many depicting the artist's self portrait - a consuming and driving force for Caroline Danforth - and not only does she offer us her visage, but also images of herself painting and working and modeling her body in various poses. See her paintings here

Scott Hutchison studied at Drake University and received his MFA from George Washington University in 1999. This very young artist is an Adjunct Professor at GWU and also taught at the Maryland College of Art and Design and the Art League. He has exhibited widely in the Mid-Atlantic region. He is a 1997 winner of the Morris Louis Painting Fellowship from GWU and has been a winner of grants from the District of Columbia Arts and Humanities Commission twice. Hutchison's new paintings are a radical departure from his earlier monochromatic works, and re-discover a bright sense of color, applied in vigorous brushstrokes to canvas and wood and delivering a series of self-portraits as well as angular, displaced views of the female nude from a variety of unusal angles and perspectives which begin to remove the human form from its usual context and place it in a setting where form and color, rather than subject, become the finished work. With his stark, brutal view of the human figure, his paintings are not for the prude or puritan, but for those who continue to admire the way that the human figure continues to drive artists to create what new and good. See his paintings here and listen to the video newscast of Channel Seven TV here.

A very special group show marking the 100th exhibition presented by the Fraser Gallery. This landmark event features work by many of the artists represented by the Fraser Gallery as well as invited artists. The exhibit will include work by Adam Bradley, Joyce Tenneson, Maxwell MacKenzie, David FeBland, John Jacobsmeyer, Chawky Frenn, Margarida Kendall, Karin Rosenthal, Tina Blondell, Jamie Wimberly, Scott Hutchison, Tim Tate, Sarah Wegner, Andrew Wodzianski, Andrzej Pluta, Tucker Bobst, Renee McGinnis, John Winslow, Lida Moser, Forrest MacCormack, Vladimir Pcholkin, Tristan Schane, Katie Kaufman, Sandra Ramos, Catriona Fraser, Douglas Malone, Sheila Giolitti, Priscilla Young, Marta Maria Perez Bravo, and many others. An opening reception was held on Friday, December 12 from 6pm - 10pm and a private party to honor the artists on Saturday, December 13. See the work of our artists here

The Fraser Gallery

7700 Wisconsin Avenue
Suite E
Bethesda, Maryland 20814
Tel/Fax: (301) 718-9651/2