Basil King and India Radfar

Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website.

Basil King is a painter/poet, born in England before World War 2 and living in Brooklyn since 1968. He attended Black Mountain College as a teenager and completed an apprenticeship as an abstract expressionist painter in San Francisco and New York. For the past three decades he has taken his art “from the abstract to the figure, from the figure to the abstract.” He began to write in the 1980’s and now practices both arts daily. His books include mirage: a poem in 22 sections, Warp Spasm, Identity, and most recently 77 Beasts/Basil King’s Beastiary and a chapbook, In the Fields Where Daffodils Grow, an excerpt from an on-going work “Learning to Draw/A history.”

India Radfar, author most recently of Position & Relation (a formal farewell to the rivers and mountains) from Station Hill/ Barrytown Books and former resident of Woodstock, N.Y. now lives in Los Angeles where she is hard at work on a memoir she calls “The Autobiography of my Mother-in-Law or Speaking Aramaic in America.” She has also just finished a new book length manuscript of poems entitled “I Thought Joan Miro was a Woman.”

In the Gallery at R&F:

Barbara Ellmann's exhibit Foreign Affairs runs through March 20, 2010.

Barbara Ellmann, painter, has had two works recently collected by the City of New York. The Cambria Heights Public Library in Queens has an expanse of 55 encaustic painted panels, ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE, which was commissioned as a part of the Percent for Art Program administered by New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs. An elevated subway platform on the J Z line in Brooklyn, is now a permanent home to seven of her abstract glass windscreens, THE VIEW FROM HERE.

"My interest has always been about repetitions, patterns and their inconsistencies, in complex arrangements. I notice the ethnic garment of a person walking in front of me, the stripes of buildings overlapping in the view from my studio, the horizontal bands of color as I drive through the landscape, the intricately embroidered textile at the street fair, and the syncopated rhythm of rectangles lit up in a residential high-rise at night. I take these observations from my lived experience, and through the language of abstraction, line, color and shape, I refer to the world out there."