New Haven Paint And Clay Club Has Day In The Sun

Hidden Lives, Anne Doris-Eisner’s piece submitted to the 2022 active members’ exhibit of the New Haven Paint and Clay Club — on view now until Oct. 8 at the gallery in Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street — is immediately recognizable as a natural form, a gnarled part of a tree. But somehow in the way Doris-Eisner has rendered the details of those textures, she has made room for abstraction as well. The more we look, the more we see: figures curled in the bark, shapes suggestive perhaps of more human forms. And, at the same time, it’s possible to stop trying to find anything in the shapes and just accept the texture for what it is, an intricate network of lines, interesting enough as it is to not require us to name it.

Doris-Eisner’s piece took Best in Show for the NHPCC’s exhibition this year. Second place went to Frank Bruckmann, third to David Ottenstein, fourth to Ava Orphanoudakis, and fifth to Richard Stephen. That Doris-Eisner should have taken home the top prize in the judging — by Kate Henderson, artist, faculty member at Paier College of Art in Bridgeport, and the director of Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville — makes a kind of overall sense. The way Hidden Lives shifts, under the viewer’s gaze, from concrete to abstract and back again, is a fitting encapsulation of this show of nearly 100 paintings and sculptures, which range across the gamut from finely realized figurative work to pieces rooted in pure expression. It offers a glimpse into what quite a number of New Haven-area artists are up to, as we continue to transition back into a life of live shows and gallery parties.

On the most figurative end of the spectrum are portraits and landscapes like David Seltzer’s depiction of a young man. The style is unfussy representation; the artist seeks to show us the subject of the painting rather than interpret it for us. That more objective approach is rendered quite powerful given the person he is representing. The man in the painting is thoroughly modern, reminding us how often portraits can be subtly anachronistic almost by default. Also, the people who sit for portraits these days are usually either well-known public figures or people with a lot of money. Seltzer is bringing the form further down to earth by painting someone who appears to be neither famous nor rich — but looks like he has a story to tell.

Maralyn Adlin’s depiction of a woman on a beach dials in a little more abstraction, eschewing details of the figure and, in the process, managing to capture the hazy sense of a very hot beach at the height of summer.

Edward Magnotti’s street scene, meanwhile, collapses the past into the present. The antique car suggests that maybe we’re looking at a day decades ago, when that car was current. Then again, maybe someone just parked their vintage car on Wooster Street. The line out the front door, heading down the block, could be happening any early weekend evening in the past 70 years.

Rosemary Cotnoir’s Tributary applies a nearly poster-like, graphic-design approach to the subject of the painting. From a distance, it conveys the winding river, the stands of trees, the dark soil. But a closer look reveals that Cotnoir has abstracted all of it into fabric-like abstraction. The attention to overall form rather than the intricacies of the surfaces at play means that the viewer doesn’t miss the forest for the trees.

And Sal Naclerio’s Lake Saltonstall, of course, bears no surface level resemblance to that nearby body of water. The brilliant, undulating gold of Naclerio’s painting is enough of a subject in itself. The title invites speculation; why did Naclerio choose to give the painting that name? Perhaps the painter just happened to be near the lake when he painted it. Maybe it’s a reference to that family’s wealth. Or maybe on some level it’s a painting of the lake after all. Maybe it’s a sunny day, and the sunlight is flashing off the waves of the lake, and Naclerio is letting us dive into one of those flashes and stay there.

The New Haven Paint and Clay Club member exhibit runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through Oct. 8. Visit CAW’s website for hours and more information. For more information on the New Haven Paint and Clay Club, visit its website.