Adae Students Find Life In Colors

Two clownfish hide in the tendrils of an anemone.: It’s a common enough scene if you’re a clownfish. But the way painter Amanda Lee has rendered the image in acrylics, it’s a riot of color, like a fireworks display.

It’s a testimony to the talent Lee has honed for herself under the instruction of Kwadwo Adae and Toni Giammona at Adae Fine Arts Academy on Chapel Street. And you can catch Lee’s work and the work of other academy students in an exhibition entering the last week of its run at the Ives branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.

The show, in the Ives Gallery in the basement of the library on Elm Street, closes Nov. 9.

On one hand, the pieces in the exhibition show quite a range. The artists themselves are both children and adults. (Lee is a student in the school’s Saturday morning children’s class.) And Adae and Giammona — who has a piece in the exhibition alongside her students — aren’t churning out students whose styles are cookie cutters of one another. They all have their own approach to their medium, their own sensibility. Some lay paint on thinly, carefully, layer by layer. Others lay it on thick, approaching the kind of texture you might get with a palette knife rather than a paintbrush.

But look again, in a different way, and a certain sensibility emerges. Each of the artists has a vibrant relationship with color, with texture. A sense of life, of movement, animates each of the pieces in the exhibit, whether the pieces are done by the youngest artists in the school — the children’s classes accept students age 7 and up — or adults with more painting experience. There are no still lifes of glass bottles and fish. No staid portraits of people with impassive expressions. They are images full of energy.

Sometimes this energy translates to fantastical imagery. Julien Sanchez-Levallois pays his respects to Blade Runner — and Blade Runner 2049 in particular — with his piece, Tears in the Rain. In A Righteous Cause, he uses collage to make his painting three-dimensional, literally adding depth to a vista of a tiered desert that looks full of both danger and opportunity. Art Webster’s Study of Beachwalker at Hudson images the ocean water as fingers of liquid reaching across the sand. A tranquil scene in his Silent Snow is enlivened by active brushstrokes.

And then there’s Emma Kennedy’s Mayor Dana which casually, yet startlingly, merges the face of a woman with the body of an antelope. She looks alert yet relaxed, aware of but unperturbed by the likes of us. The striking background color accentuates rather than subdues her sandy hide, making it glow a little. Her gaze makes it clear that she’s in charge — and we’re not.

Similarly, Theresa Cappetta’s portrait of a young girl captures her not sitting quietly in a chair, posing with a neutral expression on her face. She looks like she’s been caught mid-stride as she’s running by, laughing. It’s conveyed in the bend in her shoulder strap, in the way she looks like she’s about to tell you something, or start laughing. 

Even a piece as abstract as Donnai McNeil’s Circles Resisting buzzes with something. What could be a simple color study has more to it. The intense colors pop against the black background, and there’s a texture to the canvas itself that keeps things moving. All in all, the pieces in the exhibition are a portrait of the artists as a collective at Adae Fine Arts Academy, sharpening their skills and opening their eyes.

The Adae Fine Arts Academy exhibition can be seen at the gallery in the Ives branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, 133 Elm St., while the library is open. Click here for hours and more information.