"All 4 Color" Opens July 21 at The White Room Gallery

The WHITE ROOM Gallery

2415 Main St Bridgehampton NY 11932

Thewhiteroom.gallery ~ [email protected] ~ 631-237-1481 ~ open 11-5

"All 4 Color"

On view: July 21- August 7

Reception: Saturday July 23 from 6-8

Featuring the art of Kat O'Neill, Katherine Liepe-Levinson, Mark E Zimmerman & Barbara Bilotta

"My Dress Bruce" by Kat O'Neill. Mixed media, limited edition, 36 x 24 inches. Photo: Kat O'Neill.

Kat O’Neill

Nietzche said, “Great art is gratitude.”
And Goethe said, “In art personality is everything.”

As a fine art photographer with artistic roots in dramatic writing, Kat O’Neill works to balance gratitude and personality in all her pieces. Her portfolios, printed on metal, feature graffiti, abstract art and mixed media and have been described as provocative, imaginative and unexpected.

Kat has won many awards for her art including the Award of Excellence by Juror Karen Marks, Director of Manhattan’s Howard Greenberg Gallery, one of the world’s leading photography galleries. Her fiction series ‘Uncle Jack’s” has been gracing the arts section of The East Hampton Star since 2007.

"Stained Glass Pond #7" by Katherine Liepe-Levinson. 20 x 30 inches. Photo: Katherine Liepe-Levinson.

Katherine Liepe-Levinson

My on-going Earth/Water Series is an exploration of our local waterways, ponds, bays, and beaches, including the Quogue Wildlife Refuge, the Peconic River and Bay, Hampton Beaches, and the Hudson River. These studies are meant as a testament to the preciousness of our natural resources, which we all too often take for granted.

The unusual vibrant colors and patterns in these almost abstract works are natural results produced by the camera through available light, selected camera angles, shifting wind patterns on the water and in the foliage, refracted reflections on the water surface, cropping/zooming for close ups, and fast shutter speeds.

All images are single exposures with NO Photoshop additions or filters. I follow the basic principles of darkroom photography using Adobe Lightroom, which is a digital processor. I process the images paying particular attention to contrast, color balance, burning and dodging to bring out the details of each piece. Most of my works are limited editions. I print the smaller works myself using Epson’s archival Velvet Fine Art Paper and archival pigment inks. Larger pieces are printed by DUGGAL in Manhattan on Archival White Dibond with Archival UV protected pigments. Dibond’s special white aluminum surface and DUGGAL’s pigments create a soft, matte, painterly quality. In feng shui, metal and water support and nourish one another. Metal creates water in the productive cycle of the five elements, providing an effective complement for the Earth/Water series. As a civil society, we must learn how to better use the “metal/mettle” of our technology to support and nourish our natural resources, most especially Earth’s Water.

"UNTITLED" by Mark E Zimmerman. Acrylic on 300 pound paper, 28 x 37 inches. Photo: Mark E Zimmerman.

Mark E Zimmerman

Painting

My artistic mission is to create and cultivate my own unique visual language.

This language results from the interaction between intellect, chance, spontaneity, and vision. I have observed that my vision is informed by every experience I have had and by every emotion I have felt. So, even though I don’t paint a specifically emotional painting, the emotions brewing just below the surface rise into the work, affecting the thousands of decisions that need to be made which graphically influence form, content, and composition.

By relying on my intuition over my intellect, I put myself in that wondrous place where it feels like the painting has created itself and re-created me in the process. My work is, for me, a transformation accelerator.

Photography

My photographs, like poetry, seek to invoke emotions beyond the confines of the images themselves. Using the language of fantasy and imagination, I create images that are as equally about the artist as they are about the subject matter. I approach each photographic scene cinematically, working to display a depth that can be interpreted in many ways. I love to create photographs that embody the Mysteries, raising more questions than they give answers.

"Sea of Tranquility" by Barbara Bilotta. Acrylic and resin on canvas 38 x 40 inches. Photo: Frank Bilotta.

Barbara Bilotta

Barbara Bilotta considers herself an Abstract Expressionist, and her vibrant paintings certainly have the visual and emotional power that is so much a part of that school of painting. The striking abstract patterns in her works are more than just arrangements of colors and shapes. Her love of nature animates those patterns, forging a connection between pure abstraction and organic forms. Thanks to that link, a flowing arrangement of colors will also evoke the textures found in a rock’s surface or a body of water. There is an elemental strength in her images that grounds them, setting up a contrast with the artist’s dynamic use of colors and shapes. “My goal,” she says, “is to transform the natural order into a suggestive interpretation to stimulate the imagination.”

Much of that interpretation is rooted in Bilotta’s color palette. “I love everything that is brilliant and incredible,” she says, “and I attempt to incorporate it into my work.” This transmits itself through the bright blues, glowing yellows and intense reds that often punctuate her images, drawing the viewer’s eye into the patterns she creates. But the painter also expertly uses a whole range of subtler shades, rendering soft fields of pastel color that fade into white, or areas of rich browns and blacks. She says that one of her aims is to bring out “a beautiful interplay of light and shadows,” and is it is this which gives her images a palpable sense of physicality, even at their most abstract.

The surface of Bilotta’s paintings is also the result of an intriguing contrast. She works mostly in acrylics glazed with resin, and notes that the acrylic’s softness and the resin’s hardness combine to create a “charged atmospheric space” in which the viewer is made to feel the movement of the paint. That sensation pulls us strongly into her works, and makes the world she depicts a highly compelling one. The artist, who has shown her work widely, divides her time between Long Island and Miami.

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BASIC FACTS: "All 4 Color" is on view from July 21 to August 7, 2016. A Reception takes place on July 23, 2016 from 6 to 8 p.m. The White Room Gallery is located at 2415 Main Street, Bridgehampton, NY 11932. www.thewhiteroom.gallery.