For 12/24

Slug: Paul Davis Rises at Hampton Falls

#613342

TG – 10 cuts, emailed

By Tom O’Hara

 Paul Davis has a new home for his fifteenth year of the Sunday Antiques Markets, now at Faro Gardens Banquet Center on Route 1. Hampton Falls Antiques Market was moved from Yokens in Portsmouth because the old site was approved for demolition and redevelopment late last winter. Davis chose the new location to be closer to their biggest market, Boston, and Faro Gardens Banquet Center is proving to be an effective site due to access, visibility and good parking.

The December 12 show had more than 60 dealers offering high quality antiques that were largely American from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries with a wide array of antiques representing the decoration the utility and work product of early American artisans, craftsmen and just plain folks.

 Near the entrance was a ship’s bell from the steel ship The Nellie Troop, launched in 1889. Offered by antiques dealer Erik Wohl from Pomfret Center, Conn., the bell was cast in bronze with its original harp mount and a framed provenance. William Gittes, a dealer from New Market, N.H., had a little bit of little antiques. On a stairlike display he had a collection of a dozen unusual items, including three very small casks, a peach basket only large enough for one peach and a carved rooster.

 Don Cruise, a Baltimore dealer who also collect exotic textiles, bought from John Reese and Pat Rice an early Iroquois shawl for serious money. Gerald Slack, an antiques dealer from Casco, Maine, offered a selection of early stoneware and some primitive furniture. Near his display was an unusual tall but very small early New England corner cupboard with detailed joinery offered by Robert Hay of Plainfield, N.H.

 Lewis Alessio and Jim Shaffer, trading as Plenty and Grace, from Greene, Maine, were offering Maine furniture from the early Nineteenth Century. Mary Pinder’s Marric’s Antiques from Fremont, N.H., displayed a collection of Eighteenth Century Windsor chairs. Art Gillam, who owns two multidealer shops in the Marlborough, Mass., area brought a variety of items including a pair of eagle crest back Hitchcock chairs and an early dry sink that had a plate shelf top.

Martin Ferrick seems to find an array of very well cared for early furniture from his home in Addison, Maine, which he brings to various shows throughout the year. His collection included a comb back Windsor chair, an American Pembroke table and a Sheraton period chest of drawers.

Brian Cullity, of Sagamore, Maine, brought a small blanket box with very unusual paint decoration. Howard Graff, a founding member of the American Folk Art Museum in New York and who now has an active shop at his Vermont home, had a large collection of small antiques and folk art.

 The next Hampton Falls Antiques Markets will be January 2 and 30, March 6 and April 3. Each one follows the same schedule, opening Sunday at 10 am and closing at 3 pm. For information call 207-563-1013 or visit www.PaulDavisShows.com.

FOR 12-31

TOWARD SIMPLICITY AT SPANIERMAN w/3 cuts

ewm/lsb set 12-16 #612358

NEW YORK CITY — Spanierman Gallery will host, January 6–29, “Toward Simplicity: New Paintings by Pamela Sztybel.” This exhibition presents new oils by Sztybel, a landscape painter in the American Tonalist tradition currently living in New York City. The show will be accompanied by a catalog available from the gallery.

Although trained as a figural painter in the academic manner, Sztybel gravitated to landscape as she found it the best subject matter with which to create works of extreme simplicity that explore the limits of cognition and memory.

Her paintings evoke the inspiration that she has drawn from the art of Camille Corot, Giorgio Morandi, John Twachtman, William Merritt Chase and the American Tonalists, in particular the late canvases of George Inness. Like the Tonalists, she works in the studio, deriving her images from recollections of places she has seen mostly in New England, and she uses drawings and photographs only as aides-de-memoir.

Working in oils on paper and linen, Sztybel’s process is to isolate aspects of particular places and winnow them toward simplicity. Abstracting them to their most elemental shapes, she expresses them through a sfumato effect in which a shifting balance of atmospheric light and dark become her subject matter. Blurring forms and softening outlines, she gives her images a spatial incongruity in which depth and surface are indistinguishable.

Sztybel was born in New York City in 1956 and studied at the New School for Social Research, in the MFA program at the New York Academy of Art, and under Wolf Kahn. She is currently a trustee for the Vermont Studio Center, and has had fellowships to work at both the Santa Fe Art Institute and the Vermont Studio Center.

She has also participated as a visiting artist and as a teacher at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy, and has taught workshops at Connecticut College, New London, Conn.; the West Liberty State College, West Virginia; and the Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts in New Jersey. Her works can be found in numerous illustrious corporate and private collections.

The gallery is at 45 East 58th Street. For information, 212-832-0208.