When hearing about immigration, the word “crisis” comes to mind. Perhaps it’s because so many people are migrating everywhere in the world now. It seems like a new humanitarian predicament, but migrations have occurred in every age and time stirring the human population pot and generating conflict as well as new traditions and cuisines. In the late 1800’s for instance, the multinational population of Peru was transformed by an huge inflow of Chinese indentured laborers.
Read moreMeg Schaap Paints Joie de Vivre
In her first solo exhibition, Marie Antoinette, at Touchstone Gallery Meg Schaap explores the personality, beauty and power of the last Queen of France. This project began by a reading of Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser and then viewing Sophia Coppola’s 2009 movie Marie Antoinette. Both portrayed the compelling story of an Austrian teen who was forced to enter a political marriage with King Louis XVI, an introvert, pretty much her opposite. Meg’s painterly portrayals explore the quandaries Marie faced as she was swallowed up by the new French Court environment bound by outlandish rules, extravagance, and unbending traditions.
Read moreElaine Florimonte: Layering and Balancing
Elaine Florimonte is drawn to the simplicity and consistency of the horizon, specifically the proportions of sky, water and ground in paintings comprising her solo exhibition, The Pursuit of Balance at Touchstone Gallery, February 2018. Through her use of acrylic media and collage, she creates landscape images in an effort to find balance in an ever shifting world.
Read moreBD Richardson: Repetition, Pattern and Form--From Intimate To Immense
In what turned out to be a prescient decision, BD Richardson, fresh from earning a master’s degree from American University, began a habit of carrying a camera everywhere she went. Beginning with a trip to China as part of a women’s press group in 1980, she captured bits and pieces of that huge country just prior to its national efforts to modernize. After that, no place in the world was exempt from her restless eye: Paris, South America, North America’s heartland with its aging buildings and big skies, and coastal villages replete with fishing boats and seamen. Lately she has focused her camera up close on plant forms turning their growth patterns into mandalas.
Read moreJeanne Garant: Parallel Paintings
Touchstone oil painter Jeanne Garant paints abstractly. For a painter like Jeanne, abstract means to focus on a particular shape and color noticed at any given moment and then to discard the rest. She draws from the jumble of life rather than trying to capture it all in a photographic or three-dimensional way. Garant's attitude in creating the flat or one-perspective paintings, 275 Stripes, mirrors that of New England painter Milton Avery. “I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.”
Read moreKate McConnell: Capturing Color in the Landscape
kate-portrait
How does the artist paint the landscape while, at the same time, paint from the “deeps” of the soul? Painter Emily Carr posed that question to herself as she painted alone in the forests of British Columbia sometime in the 1930’s. “What do I want to express? ... The arrangement, the design, colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance, not one or all of these fills the bill. There is something additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing, a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness of all things,” she writes in her journal.
Read moreLina Alattar: The Unscripted Experience of Painting
Lina Alattar
“Abstract work has its own way of explaining itself,” says Lina Alattar, an abstract painter at Touchstone Gallery who works in acrylics on canvas. To understand how her paintings speak, she tunes into each one by being consciously aware and open. “I just respond to the marks, because it’s the experience of painting that drives the painting.” Knowing that nothing is scripted opens the door to tolerance for “accidents” that happen during the painting process. For Lina, these unexpected happenings in the creative process preempt any preconceived ideas. Each one shows her the possibility of going in a different direction, a road less traveled perhaps. American contemporary painter Helen Frankenthaler summed it up saying, “You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognize it, how to control it, or ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks complete and born all at once.”
Read moreTouchstone Gallery Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary!
It’s 2016 and Touchstone Gallery is in a celebratory mood! Being one of the longest-tenured and most highly regarded artist-owned galleries in Washington, DC, Touchstone will celebrate its 40th year in Washington on May 13th with an Anniversary Gala and a May 4-29 member artists show, featuring solo artists, Paula Lantz and Colleen Sabo, and works by present and former members. The gala and show are open to the public.
Read moreAina Nergaard-Nammack: The Language of Music and Color
Aina in studio
A child of a Norwegian father and a Spanish mother, Aina spent her early years toggling between school in the frigid north to hot summers in the heart of Spain -- a life that was bound to teach her many languages. Five to be exact. Add to that sum Aina's study of various "languages" in the visual arts. First with her mother on painting excursions to the "White Villages" in the south of Spain, practicing in her mother's studio in Seville, and then being instructed formally in art school where she was required to copy the Old Masters, including Velasquez, Vermeer and Goya.
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