Allan Appel Photo
Three years ago Hannah Baldwin was asked to hang 16 of her large paintings of Afghanistan, including a portrait of Hamid Karzai in that country’s embassy, in Washington. She was hoping she might eventually get paid for them and even asked if Halliburton company might want to buy them.
That was three years ago. She’s proud they’re still in the embassy. She’s also still waiting for someone to pay.
Baldwin now painting very different Morandi-esque still life scenes on a much smaller scale — and not of Afghanistan but Stony Creek.
She is one of four artists showing new work at Hull’s Fine Framing & Gallery in New Haven.
The opening reception on Thursday night for Baldwin and three other Stony Creek-based artists — Laura Barr, Anita Soos, and Barbara Marks — drew a festive crowd to the Whitney Avenue gallery.
Billed as a “summer salon,” the work, except for Baldwin’s dark hued, even brooding compositions, suggested on the surface the emotion and accoutrements of warm weather fun.
Anita Soos has a series of small oils on canvas that portray aerial views of breezy islands and, in my opinion, a more successful series of plates of fruit — yellow lemons, apricots, and figs, among them.
Barbara Marks’s monotypes are careful studies of some 90 birthday cakes, and counting. Click here to view her website.
And Laura Barr’s “Night Life!” series would purport to be the biggest glasses of grapefruit soda and bourbon and water that have ever been served in either Stony Creek or the Hamptons. Even in her Honey Series, one of those signature tumblers had wandered in.
It would be a mistake to assume these works are “about” summer revelry, although, with the exception of Baldwin, they seem to visually transport you to the verandah.
Marks calls her work a visual memoir “about domesticity, narrative, memory, and figuration.”
For Barr, the strips of color, suggesting reflection, up and down her glasses and the tables they reside on make her case, she said, that the work “is about color, light, reflection, and shadow.”
Although she, like all the artists, work from models, her liquids, she said are imaginary and she often uses dyes and colored waters. “It’s important,” she said, “not to suggest alcohol.”
What intrigues this artist is what she called the world of light, reflection, and visual activity within these glasses. She began to notice this, she said, at dinner parties (in all seasons, one presumes), when the conversation perhaps lagged. She’s interested, she said “in the abstract within the glass. By working large, it causes you to notice.”
Taken together against the massive libations drinks, cakes, and fruit plates, be they real or imaginary, Hannah Baldwin’s small brooding scenes make for an interesting contrast, as if to say, yes, summer is fine and good, but it passes every year and the colder, greyer, darker seasons will surely come.
What got her working in this vein, and size, was not a temperamental change, but an occupational one. Two years ago she and her husband, with kids flown the nest, converted their home into the Linden Point House, a bed and breakfast in Stony Creek.
She’s busy now in a way she wasn’t when the larger Afghanistan paintings got done in the early 1970s, when she traveled there with her husband, a photographer.
Now she can do about one still life per setting. It gives her a sense of instant accomplishment.
So how did the previous works get to Washington, D.C.? Before she became an innkeeper, Baldwin said she had had a show in Stony Creek, some five years ago, in which one of the works was the portrait of Hamid Karzai.
“Former Congressman Toby Moffett saw it,” Baldwin said. “He bought it and gave it to Ambassador Jawad of Afghanistan in 2006. Three years ago I got a call from the Afghanistan embassy asking if I’d bring some work down to decorate their walls.”
Baldwin said she was thrilled. She herself paid for the framing, the transportation, and she and her family made a true occasion out of it. As to payment, “it’s a poor country,” she said, and, as is often the case, she expected a donor would come through to buy on behalf of Afghanistan. She said Halliburton, the huge subcontractor for the American government in Iraq and elsewhere, had appeared to be interested, but nothing concrete has happened yet.
She’s hardly angry. “I feel honored,” she said, calling it all fortuitous. If they’re still there, she said, when she has grandchildren, she’ll be proud they can proclaim their grandmother’s paintings are in the Afghan embassy.
In the meantime, Baldwin, Barr, Soos, and Marks are showing work well worth a summer’s day visit through Aug. 27. It’s the 13th show in 22 months since the busy Hull’s gallery has been open. Who knows but somebody from Halliburton may wander in.
