"This may be difficult."  

Paintings by Jay Edge.

Hosted by The Upstairs Gallery at Caprice Bistro, 

November 15th 2012 through January 2013. 

 Opening will be held on Weds. November 15th, 6pm - 9pm.   

Darren Mulvenna's Upcoming Show at Brunswick Community College.

Darren Mulvenna will be showing his recent paintings in the Dean's Gallery at Brunswick Community College.  The opening reception will be 5pm until 6pm on Wednesday March 16th.

Mulvenna's work embraces the patterns of Nature both in subject matter and in the development of his paintings.  Layers of paint and imagery emerge and recede, darken, glow from within, intensify, push and fade; the process searches out harmony in the environment, seeks to distill a rhythm in visual essence.  The paintings seem to exist comfortably in their frames, content & still, before pulsing back out with something new.  Environments are familiar despite the disconnect from common appearance, his surreal landscapes being slightly abstracted (maybe skewed is a better word), moving and dancing like dream-images following a hike in the woods.  One recognizes immediately the living scenes, a bather swimming in an ebbing aquatic light, a female torso rapt in a transcendent light, a classical dancer juxtaposed in a brackish chiaroscuro.  Mulvenna's saturation of life, his vivacity, is cathartic in the vibrant palette and the easy imagery, his figures flying playfully across lush fields and schools of fish languidly pushed in current through a diptych.

Mulvenna's work is life affirming.  One can see his own efforts in connecting to Nature, in finding his place within the complex weave of things, and then transcribing that marvel into these paintings.  His work honestly derives from an artist searching for something that is universal and relate-able, and it does so with glimpses of beauty that elevate the viewer for a fine moment.

Art Opening for Cody Justus-

Caprice Bistro will host an exhibit of paintings by Cody Justus in the upstairs Sofa Lounge gallery. His explorations of “internal structure (and) external surface” are visually powerful, pushing his painting-constructs off of the wall and into the viewer’s head, provoking questions on the nature of raw material versus finished product.  The paintings vibrate with color and texture, these equal forces arguing and commingling in shared spaces, pushing the clean & tight against the rustic & weathered.  Yet the non-objective canvases remain dynamic, united, a testimony to his intuitive sense of design. A holism is preserved in the work.  I have seen three paintings by Justus, and each piece conveys a wide knowledge of art history and art creation.  First impressions brought associations of Arte Povera, where construction of the piece,the physical elements (raw, unrefined) and their manifestation, was paramount over the ultimate image-composition. Ryman and Stella come to mind, with Ryman’s painterly white surfaces enunciating the hardware of a piece, or Stella’s funky canvas-constructs breaking traditional frames and forms of canvas.  Even Albers could show up in Justus’s understanding of color, which is superbly developed but subtle.  Ultimately, Justus’s work is his own, soundly independent and self-sufficient, impossible to cross-reference into another artist or school of thought. The dialogue of his materials is his own creative voice.  His canvases convey an intelligent presence, and he will surely create a lively dialogue of paint and material, of internal and external, of plasticity versus volume, and produce a fine show out of his explorations.  The opening reception will be held February 3rd from 6pm to 10pm.