City Gallery Offers Pandemic Practice

The plants in Joyce Greenfield’s paintings are exquisitely rendered, but the paintings are more than just still-life studies. Something’s afoot in the composition. It’s a little eerie, maybe a little unsettling, and at the same time, the plants look tired. The titles of the paintings — Dystopian Sunflower, Dystopian Lily — offer a clue. The mood isn’t in the subject, but in the mind of the painter. If they weren’t painted during the pandemic, they might as well have been. They reflect the exhaustion many feel. And at the same time, they also reflect a dogged persistence — not only flowers growing in drought, but painters continuing to paint — that emerges as the theme of City Gallery’s contribution to City Wide Open Studios this year, running now in the gallery’s space on Upper State Street through Nov. 1.

Photographers Tom Peterson and William Frucht were at the gallery on Saturday to offer insight into how it has been to make art in the past few months.

Lake Avenue Danbury ​“was taken on the day Connecticut reported its first death from Covid-19,” Frucht said. He had just started working from home. He doesn’t usually like to photograph anything at that low level of light, but that day ​“the light exactly matched my mood,” he said. ​“I didn’t want to photograph anything pretty.”

During the pandemic, Frucht has continued to develop his photography practice. ​“There are a bunch of things I’m trying to do now,” he said. He’s getting more interested in the way ​“abstraction intersects with realism.” In April, he found an example at a nearby car dealership. ​“I wanted to get these strange, otherworldly shapes in this very prosaic environment,” he said. The balloons were ​“the key. They’re just so lively.”

Peterson reported that he ​“wasn’t doing any photography at all” in the early months of the pandemic, but then started going out to take pictures again in September. He returned to ​“what I used to do — documentary photography,” he said.

On Hamilton Street in New Haven, ​“there was a red couch that was against the wall.” The next day, he said, ​“someone had moved the couch so that I could take this picture.” The next day, it had been moved again, ​“and it was another picture.” He never figured out who had been doing the moving.

Peterson’s second image came from an intersection in Meriden, leading onto Colony Street. The building in the picture has been vacant for 10 years. ​“The arrows are new,” he said.

In doing photography during the pandemic, both Frucht and Peterson noted the relative lack of people, not only in their images, but in the streets around them while they took their pictures. Frucht said that he has never been furtive about what he’s doing; he makes a point of being visible while he sets up his tripod, camera, and other gear. Before the pandemic, he said, he encountered people who didn’t want to end up in one of his pictures, and people who actively asked him to take their picture (“I always do,” he said).

Peterson said that when he took street pictures before the pandemic began, passersby would stop and tell him how the block had appeared in past, as far back as 30 years ago. ​“You got to know what the changes were,” he said. ​“They wanted to help you out,” and ​“that was always gratifying. Now you go out and there’s nobody who’s going to tell you about the neighborhood anymore.”

A somber, contemplative mood is on display in other pieces in City Gallery as well. With Boulder Field, Jennifer Davies eschews variety in color to concentrate on shape and texture. It may be tempting to read current events into it, but the artist’s work in muted tones and fascination with the complicated surfaces of natural forms easily predate the pandemic.

Likewise, Kathy Kane’s Jericho is a continuation of the artist’s years-old explorations with paint, moving away from the use of vibrant color and instead exploring the possibilities for effect using a simpler color palette and the ragged edges of black on white.

Even if the artists’ ongoing work is more a product of their own processes than a response to current events, the art can still resonate. The title of Meg Bloom’s A Tangled Mess is an apt description of both the artwork itself (humorous) and today’s news (less funny). Either way, the act of making art is itself a meaningful response. There’s something to be said for making art — and, when a piece to done, for simply making another one — in the face of everything.

City Gallery’s City Wide Open Studios exhibit runs in the gallery space at 994 State St. through Nov. 1. The gallery is open Saturday and Sunday 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. or by appointment. Check the gallery’s website for more details.