Date: Fri 24-Sep-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: CAROLL

Quick Words:

Journey-Abstraction

Full Text:

Journey To Abstraction

(with 2 cuts)

NEW BRITAIN, CONN. -- The first art show of the season at Central Connecticut

State University, titled "Journey to Abstraction," provides rare insights into

how four painters work to create unique and abstract images.

Tina Feingold, Deborah Kahn, Mary Kenealy and Deborah Muirhead are showcased

in "Journey to Abstraction," which runs through October 5 in the Samuel T.

Chen Art Center, Maloney Hall, on Stanley Street.

As part of the exhibit, source materials, including drawings from paintings

and photographs of the artist's studio, will be on display to illustrate the

evolutionary dimension in the art process.

Although she started as a figurative artist, Tina Feingold says, "My work has

become increasingly abstract. The forms are created through the process of

layering paint. Gradually, the picture evolves as the layers, colors and

texture lead to interesting new discoveries." Sometimes she uses stencils to

get an image started.

Feingold, who lives in Brookline, Mass., has taught at Emerson College, Boston

College, and Northeastern University, and was a visiting critic in the

Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

Deborah Kahn also began as a figurative artist working primarily with still

life. Like Feingold she works in oil and employs layering, repainting and

editing to discover her images. A member of the Bowery Gallery in New York

City, Kahn is an associate professor of painting and drawing at The American

University, Washington, D.C. She has been a visiting artist/professor at

various universities, including Chautauqua Institution School of Art,

Swarthmore College, Dartmouth College, and at Rowan College, Glassboro, N.J.

About her art, Mary Kenealy says, "The symbols I specifically depict are the

cross and the window which are structurally similar due to their perpendicular

nature. The works are not about proselytizing, but do reference religious

narrative." Cultivating repetitious spiritual geometry in the "Pater Noster

(Our Father, 1999)" watercolor series and generally in her work, Kenealy says

she uses the "rectangular or square window format as a metaphor for

enlightenment as in Renaissance painting."

An adjunct professor in the Department of Art at CCSU, Kenealy holds an MFA

from Yale and has specialized in printmaking as well as watercolor. She has

been adjunct faculty at Fairfield University and resident artist at Trinity

College. Her works are in the public collections of Yale, the Wadsworth

Atheneum, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the Nelson Atkins Art

Gallery, Kansas City, Mo.

Storytelling interests Deborah Muirhead. "The inspiration for my work comes

from combined interests in genealogical research, African-American literature

and history," she says. "I use these materials as the catalyst for creating

fictional narratives that investigate historical invisibility and exclusion."

Her recent work, mixed media on canvas, is inspired by the unearthing of

bodies from an African-American burial ground in lower Manhattan. In a series

of paintings called "Names" (1995) and "Red Shoes" (1995), seen at Artspace in

New Haven and 100 Pearl Gallery in Hartford, Muirhead, who teaches at the

University of Connecticut, creates luminous dreamscapes that combine images

and text.

Muirhead has had two solo exhibitions in 1999 at ARC Gallery, Chicago, and the

Housatonic Museum, Bridgeport, Conn. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim

Foundation fellowship and a New England Foundation for the Arts NEA artist's

grant.

Gallery hours are Monday to Friday, 1 to 4 pm and Sunday, 2 to 5 pm. Telephone

860/832-2633.