J.J. Blickstein and Anne Gorrick

February 17, 2007 at 2pm
The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue, Kingston, NY

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at
http://www.rfpaints.com/

Join us to celebrate the publication of J.J. Blickstein's new book, Barefoot on a drawing of the Sun (Fish Drum, www.fishdrum.com).

J. J. Blickstein is a poet, visual artist, & the editor/publisher of the now defunct Hunger Magazine & Press. He lives in Upstate New York next to the Esopus River with a lovely biologist and three kids. He works as a stone mason/handyman & occasionally teaches about the tarot. A chapbook, Visions of Salt & Water was published by Bagatela Press (Juarez, Mexico/El Paso, TX, 2003). His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the following journals: Van Gogh’s Ear (France), House Organ, Arson, Fire (UK), Skanky Possum, Milk, 5_Trope, The Louisiana Review, Dream International Quarterly, Sundog: A Southwestern Literary Review, and Heavenbone. His work has also appeared in the following anthologies: American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (University of Iowa Press, 2001), Vespers: Religion & Spirituality in Contemporary American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2003), and Shamanic Warriors, Now Poets (R&R Publishing, Scotland, 2004).

You can see his work at:

http://www.poembeat.com/winter2002/blickstein.html

http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooOne/blickstein.html

http://www.hungermagazine.com/is4p2.htm

Anne Gorrick’s poetry has been published in many journals including: American Letters and Commentary, the Cortland Review, Dislocate, eratio, Fence, Gutcult, Hunger Magazine, No Tell Motel, the Seneca Review, Sulfur, and word for/word. She has work in the following anthologies: The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, (No Tell Press, 2006) and Homage to Vallejo (Greenhouse Review Press, 2006). Collaborating with artist Cynthia Winika, she produced a limited edition artists’ book called “Swans, the ice,” she said with grants from the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York State Council for the Arts. Bored to death by the confines of her laser printer, she is also a visual artist working in traditional Japanese papermaking, printmaking and encaustic.

Check out her work at:

http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/30/gorrick.html

http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/issue8_Gorrick.html

http://www.gutcult.com/Site/litjourn6/html/AG1.htm

Currrently in the Gallery at R&F:

The artists featured in Not Seeing the Forest use the metaphor of landscape to express the potential of the process of painting.

For Natalie Abrams, (Denver, CO), the landscape symbolizes her relationship with history. Working both pictorally and in a Minimalist style, her encaustic paintings bare the wounds of history by revealing layer upon layer of growth and decay. Carved into and torn back, Abrams’s paintings expose the beauty and pain buried within the landscape of the painting. Abrams’s Minimalist work speaks to what the artist has described as "the texture of a moment...the final air bubble just under the surface, having escaped from someone who’s been under too long..."

The work of Dorothy Robinson, (Brooklyn, NY), has evolved out of a deep fascination with the metaphor of landscape and the expressive possibilities of oil paint. In working with paint, Robinson finds that aspects of the physical environment emerge and demand expression. Water, weather and geological processes become agents of change, acting on landforms that are repositories of memory and accumulated experience. The process is two-fold: to allow disparate elements to arise from the unconscious through the spontaneous application of paint; and to weave these together into a landscape that, despite numerous impossibilities, makes sense to her. Says the artist, "I am trying to convey not a moment, but a process, one that integrates a series of infinitely small changes into a larger whole."

The creation of nonspecific place is the focus of Pam Wallace, (Lynchburg, VA). Detailed representational images of part of a natural object, devoid of contextual clues, act as metaphor and invite the viewer into a familiar but imaginary place for the human spirit to dwell. Wallace’s process begins with actual trees, from which plates are made. Prints made from yhe plates are used in mixed media works with encaustic. "Trees go through life cycles of a few to several decades", explains the artist. "During one year of four seasons, however, they epitomize the beautiful but transitory nature of life; as buds give way to green, turn brilliant, and fall to earth. In the woods, we can appreciate the silence, the solitude, the opportunity to be contemplative. We become aware of being part of all that has preceded us."