Dear Friends,

Welcome to the blog for the Marcia Wood Gallery. This new blog is our way of staying in touch with you in a more personal manner than we can do on our website (though we hope you’ll visit it, too). Since the blog is new, it will surely evolve. For now, we’ve got updates on what our artists have been doing—we’re posting new information weekly—and what we’re doing as a gallery in terms of fairs and travel. Eventually we hope to include interviews with our artists, and some first-person pieces, maybe even special projects, by our artists and gallery friends.

 

If you’re going to be in New York at the end of the month, come by and say Hey. We’ll be at the Pulse Fair, booth #I-12.

Best,

Marcia

Thursday, March 13, 2008

kate javens


Solo Exhibition: March 6 - April 12, 2008
Kate Javens' paintings in oil on wood, linen, and muslin, are stunning both for the breathtaking beauty of her brushstroke as well as for their passionate moral intensity. In a painting style that synthesizes an Old Masters clarity of light with a basis in American naturalism and realism, Javens connects with the viewer by an empathy to her subjects - paintings of animals which are named for, and in fact stand as metaphorical portraits of, figures in American history; persons who represent, to Javens, an altogether admirable altruism and social activism that deserve to be commemorated.    


Father Ram, 2006, oil on theater muslin, 66 x 106 inches

Javens' exquisite paintings of animals are about much more than what is immediately apparent to the eye.  As the scholar Alan Burdick writes in his essay for the catalog of Javens exhibition at the Blanden Art Museum, "It is tempting to view her paintings as depictions of animals.  In fact, and far more remarkably, what she exposes are the brief moments of time through which the creatures are passing."  

Kate Javens was born in Missouri and spent her childhood in Japan, Mexico, and the bicoastal United States.  She attended Pennsylvania State University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Javens is a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Painting Fellow, A per Fellowship in the Arts Disciplinary Winner in Painting, and a three-time MacDowell fellow.  Her works are held in private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, the Telfair Muesum of Art and The Blanden Museum of Art.  She lives and works in New York City.  


Kate Javens
American Beasts

This beautifully produced hard-bound publication from the Blanden Art Museum has a foil embossed linen cover and a full color dust jacket.  It includes images from Javens' recent works, as well as earlier series and her rarely seen studio photography.  Kate Javens' Named For... series is a collection of creatures -- moths, horses, birds, fish -- that are named for historical Americans.  About Andrew Furuseth, a seaman from the early 1900s who was threatened with a jail sentence for labor injunction, Javens has written, "When I saw a Dorothea Lange portrait of this beautiful man, I was struck by the crow-ness of his visage.  A year-and-a-half after, I found a dead crow on the ground, still warm.  I bent over him and said, "Hello Andrew."  
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