Lynn Behrendt and Robert Kelly

October 20, 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/

Lynn Behrendt came to the Hudson Valley three decades ago to study poetry with Robert Kelly. She has published four chapbooks of poetry: The Moon as Chance, Characters, Tinder, and most recently, 8 Poems from Meridian Roundelay. She edits The Annandale Dream Gazette, an online newspaper of poets' dreams. She also welds and makes steel sculpture, a few of which can be seen at: http://www.vincemurraywelding.com/ Her portraits of poets are at: http://www.poetportraits.blogspot.com/ Lynn lives in Red Hook, NY with her husband and two sons.

Robert Kelly’s latest books are Lapis (Godine-Black Sparrow) and Shame/Scham, a prose collaboration with the German poet Birgit Kempker (McPherson). Forthcoming are the long poem The Language of Eden (Black Square), the chapbook Terre Sainte (Shivastan), the poem cycle Threads (First Intensity) and a big collection of poems 2003-2005, May Day, from Parsifal Press. Kelly has taught at Bard College in New York State for many years, and is a director of the Writing Program there. His wife is the translator Charlotte Mandell. They live in Annandale-on-Hudson.

The Gallery at R&F is pleased to present a solo exhibition by New York artist, Richard Purdy. This mini-retrospective will focus on the artists’ innovative encaustic works from the year 2000 to the present. Richard Purdy: Encaustics 2000-2007 will run from October 6th through November 24th, 2007.

Richard Purdy's paintings employ a mechanism derived from cutting-edge scientific thought. Inspired by the physicist Stephen Woldram’s book, "A New Kind of Science", Purdy’s compositions are generated by a mathematical system called cellular automata - grid-based formations where the identity of each element is determined by its immediate neighbors. In their pure state, the successive boxes of cellular automata are filled by numerical values, and only a mathematician can recognize the complex patterns they reveal—to the rest of us, they appear to be numbers distributed at random. In Purdy’s paintings, however, colors take the place of numbers, making the patterns visible to everyone. And to the surprise even of the artist, the patterns they create are incredibly beautiful in the way that geometric structures often can be, revealing the living implications of advanced scientific thought. Purdy combines the use of computer generated patterning with children’s drawing implements, such as stencils and the spirograph, to yield a range of visual possibilities not available from other media.

Richard Purdy was born in Chicago and attended Indiana University of Pennsylvania (BA in Fine Arts 1978) and the School of Visual Arts (MFA in Computer Arts). He is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City. For more information about the artist and his work, visit http://www.richardprudy.net/