3/17 Reading Canceled for Snow

The weather gods apparently are up 50-0 against the poetry gods.

Dennis Doherty and Carly Sachs
March 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/

Dennis Doherty is Director of the Creative Writing Program at SUNY New Paltz, where he teaches creative writing, literature, outraged love, and friendly subversion. His essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Yankee Magazine, Chiron Review, Slipstream, Slant, Bayou, and dozens of other reviews and anthologies. His first poetry collection, The Bad Man (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press), appeared in 2004. His second collection, Fugitive (Codhill Press), is due out in the spring of 2007.

Carly Sachs teaches creative writing at George Washington University. Her first book of poems, the steam sequence won the 2006 Washington Writers’ Publishing House first book prize. With Reb Livingston, she curates Lolita and Gilda’s Burlesque Poetry Hour at Bar Rouge in Washington, DC. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Alimentum, Another Chicago Magazine, Beltway Quarterly Review, Coconut, CrossRoads, MiPoesias, Poem Memoir Story, No Tell Motel, Runes Review, and Best American Poetry 2004. Visit Carly's blog at: http://fivefeetabovewater.blogspot.com/index.html

Check out Carly's work:

http://www.coconutpoetry.org/sachs1.htm

http://www.mipoesias.com/Poetry/sachs_carly.html

http://www.notellmotel.org/poem_single.php?id=348_0_1_0

Currrently in the Gallery at R&F until March 31, 2007, 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."