TOM SHOOTER

Biography

Education:

1971: School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Graduate School)/Tufts University, Boston: B.F.A./M.F.A.
1965: School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
1961: Lycoming College, Williamsport, PA

Awards:

1985: Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation
1979: Massachusetts Council on the Arts& Humanities Grant
1976: Boston Bicentennial Painting Commission
1966: National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities Grant
1966: 34th James W. Paige Fellowship in Painting

Recent Exhibitions:

1994: Three Painters, Lincoln center Gallery, Fordham, NYC
1994: Anything Goes, Westbeth Gallery, New York
1993: Masks, Westbeth Gallery, New York

Carl Belz, Director of the Rose Art Museum, on Tom Shooter's Recent Paintings (Reprinted, with permission from the artist, from Tom Shooter, New Paintings, September 10 through October 1, Westbeth Gallery, New York, NY)

I feel a real kinship with Tom Shooter's paintings and modus operandi. Shooter's paintings speak to me on one level of repetitions and controls and grids. They all consist of two colors, the format is the same in every one, a smaller square centered within a larger square, and significant clusters of them are all the same size.

The situation is simple enough, at least it seems simple enough, but a simple description hardly accounts for the paintings' actual complexity or the way they work as paintings.

Though two colors dominate them, few, if any are in fact two-color pictures; the majority contain layers of hues that are glazed softly over one another, aerating the surface, allowing it to breathe and generating a delicate chromatic texture. And the painted squares that float in the center of the square canvas supports are only squares more or less, just as they are only more or less in the center; they are loosely sited, they're freely drawn, and they're sometimes a little taller than they are wide.

Not by thought or measure, but by feeling and intuition are these pictures made, a fact about them that is contextualized and in turn made fully evident by the constraints they quietly accommodate and at the same time gently resist. Equally are they personal, hence, unique, yet they intersect deeply with the concerns of other artists of our time, and of earlier modernists as well, the ones concerned with light and color and touch and pigment and the sheer pleasures associated with painting.

Finally, I respond to these pictures' modesty, their willingness to pursue their aims without theatrical posturing or an agenda of any kind. Content with going about their business, they allow us to do the same, to come to them freely and share intimately their generous offerings.

UNTITILED	14"x14" copyright 1996 Tom Shooter
UNTITILED	60"x60" copyright 1996 Tom Shooter
UNTITILED	14"x14" copyright 1996 Tom Shooter
UNTITILED	28"x28" copyright 1996 Tom Shooter

Biography:

Liz Haskel is an artist who lives and works in New York. She has exhibited in various galleries in New York and Connecticut including Westbeth, Ernest Rubenstein and Bloodroot. Ms. Haskel received her B.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Cornell University. She has studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the Educational Alliance Art School.

Artist's Statement About Her Work:

I am an abstract painter who always paints figures. I am a figurative artist whose figures are the least important, least evolved areas of the rectangle. I paint "pretty" pictures which people find uncomfortable. I paint symbolic objects which have no meaning beyond the idea of the symbol. I paint small, sharp things which appear irrelevant to the whole. I paint unclear planes and spaces which appear both right and wrong. I think carefully about historical antecedents -- in the 90s, a contradiction itself. I believe painting should be above all an aesthetic experience of color, form and space, but write about my conceptual process.

UNTITILED	No info copyright 1996 Liz Haskel
UNTITILED	No info copyright 1996 Liz Haskel
UNTITILED	No info copyright 1996 Liz Haskel

Biography:

Marcy Wasserman's paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the Northeast, including the Bronx Museum, Westbeth Gallery, Ernest Rubenstein Gallery, Prince Street Gallery and Plaza Gallery at Lincoln Center, New York City. In addition, she has exhibited in numerous galleries in the New England area including Cyvia Gallery, Carlson Gallery, Wave Gallery, Habitat and Brattle House.

Ms. Wasserman is the recipient of three Polaroid Foundation Grants, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received her B.F.A. from California College of Arts and Crafts and a M.S. from the University of Bridgeport.

Artist's Statement About Her Work:

On the simplest level my paintings depict fruits and vegetables, the freshness, color and placement of which give pleasure to the viewer. On another plane, the objects are pigments arranged on a two dimensional surface in a strong opposition.

The paintings can be perceived as abstract works, where the shapes and colors chosen take the outward form of familiar objects. I have chosen to communicate to the viewer my ideas and feelings about all the things on the canvas, not only by the objects shown, but about their relation to each other and my life.

Simultaneously I achieve a unity of color, form and composition. In effect, I deconstruct reality and reconstruct it into my image of the world.

My work depicts fruits and vegetables, arranged in tableau or singly, sometimes with microscopic attention to its typography; sometimes as if from a distance with the emphasis on surface --- sometimes as if it were a landscape -- and often in subtle combinations. These paintings are in the tradition of the Spanish Bodega paintings of Velazquez and Zubaran, which are equally at home in the art gallery or the kitchen.

UNTITILED	36"x48" copyright 1996 Marcy Wasserman
UNTITILED	No Info copyright 1996 Marcy Wasserman
UNTITILED	40"x52" copyright 1996 Marcy Wasserman
UNTITILED	48"x54" copyright 1996 Marcy Wasserman