Lynn Christian “#12″ 18 x 24 inches, oil on canvas

Lynn Christian “#18″ 30 x 30 inches, oil on canvas

Lynn Christian “#13″ 20 x 20 inches, oil on canvas

Artist Statement

These paintings usually begin with an idea about color, and a feeling, sometimes of a memory. They evolve on the canvas through an interplay of application and correction, based on no program or requirement. Emotion, music, subconscious, and practice, attempts to visually represent itself while aspiring to a type of balance.

Website

http://www.lynnchristianpaintings.com/

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“Brooklyn Navy Yard: Building 128″, photograph

“Brooklyn Navy Yard: Admirals’ Row, Grand Ballroom”, photograph

“Brooklyn Navy Yard: GMD Shipyard”, photograph

Twilight on the Waterfront: Brooklyn’s Vanishing Industrial Heritage

My photographs bring you inside places you may have walked by a thousand times and always wondered about. They take you into Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront, a world closed to the public for decades. These fenced-off factories, refineries and shipyards lining our waterfront are often beautiful and full of surprises. They are also quickly disappearing. In 2007, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed Brooklyn’s entire industrial waterfront at the top of their “Most Endangered” list. Many of the places in my photographs have already been torn down as the pace of development quickens.

Once, Brooklyn had the most vital working waterfront in America. Today, its industrial heritage is almost gone. My photographs document the twilight of the waterfront.

I grew up within view of the San Francisco Navy Yard and now live two blocks from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. I have always been fascinated by the edges of waterfront cities. My documentary work is informed by many artists, including the anonymous photographers of the international Urban Exploration movement. They explore the off-limits parts of cities while ignoring traditional trespassing laws. Visiting old tunnels, factories and military bases, they document the true history of the urban landscape. Through their large network of online photography communities, I’ve met many talented photographers who were often with me as I explored the waterfront.

Now Exhibiting at the
Brooklyn Public Library
June 17, 2008 – August 30, 2008
Central Library, Grand Lobby

For more information on the exhibit, click here.

and at

The Brooklyn Museum
Click! A Crowd Curated Exhibit
June 27–August 10, 2008

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/

Contact the artist: http://kensinger.blogspot.com/

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Paul Catalanotto, “Those Places That Once We Visited” 30×36 inches

Paul Catalanotto, “Seeping Beauty” 80×36 inches

Paul Catalanotto, “Neuron Roulette” detail

Artist Statement

My current work is about how we see and experience color. It is based on my theory that colors have universal physical properties. I rely heavily on these physical properties, how they react with each other and my plaster medium to embody our visual experience.

I developed a white plaster medium that, when mixed with colors, takes on the personality of each color. I apply the tinted plaster with trowels and other various plastering tools. My trowels become forces of nature, compressing, burying, scraping back, pushing and pulling the colors around. The stress I apply to my medium helps bring out its true colors.

My white plaster medium is stored energy, akin to other white things in nature — seeds, sperm, fat, clouds, snow. “The known undecomposed earths are, in their pure state, all white.”* When red is mixed in, the plaster is transformed. It runs, it bleeds, it seeps into the other colors like a virus. Blue, at the other end of the spectrum, makes the plaster thick and sticky. It stays. It blankets. So sticky that, as light, it clings to the air in the sky. Yellow, between the two extremes, has what I call the Goldilocks effect – it’s just right. Creamy and spreadable, it is the easiest color to apply with a trowel.

In order for my Polished Frescos to connect to people on an individual basis, I never have any set imagery in mind. My job is to pay attention to color order and harmony; light and shadow; and the laws of physics, especially gravity, to achieve some sort of imagery.

At certain points in the process, I let the colors take over while my role is to recognize and freeze moments in time. I strive to capture these spontaneous moments between the struggle to exist and the flow toward nothingness.

My work is a product of a long term relationship with tinted plaster and a sense of responsibility to let the medium thrive in an unrestricted environment. It’s about finding ways to work with the plaster as opposed to dominating it — to let it go in directions untethered to a set destination.

*from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Theory of Colours, first published in English in 1840.

Contact the artist

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