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by Seth Rogovoy
Artists from the Berkshires and beyond will be represented in an exhibition featuring works in such diverse media as traditional hand- made paper and state-of-the-art digital imagery at the Front St. Gallery in Housatonic beginning Friday, July 12, and running through Sunday, Aug. 4. An official opening will be held on Sunday, July 14, from 5 to 7.
Included in the exhibit will be collages by Keith Waldrop of Providence, R.I., digital photographs by Dan Englander of Albany, N.Y., photographs by Celia Coolidge of Lenox, drawings and sculpture by Lisa Yetz of Pittsfield and oil paintings by Diana Gala of Lenox.
While their works are very different, both in terms of form and content, some familiar themes emerge in the discussions with the artists that follow. In particular, a number of them see their artwork as a way to work through personal problems or obsessions.
Also, a few of them have a very personal relationship with their chosen forms. "I get a rush from it and I just know that I have to do it," said Coolidge about her street photography. To listen to Yetz, Gala and Englander speak of the thrill they get from manipulating hand-made paper, oil paint and photographic images, respectively, is to hear echoes of the basic joy and satisfaction that children receive from play. As such, these artists have something to teach us not only about their specific subjects, but about what it means to be human.
The Front St. Gallery is a member-run cooperative that opened in the summer of 1991. It is open Friday through Sunday from noon to 5. The phone number is (413) 274-6607.
"There is something about the organic quality of paper that I like," said Lisa Yetz, explaining why she creates her drawings and sculptures with paper she has made herself.
"Most of my work for the last four or five years has been centered on paper," said Yetz, 33, a native of Pittsfield who studied at Berkshire Community College, the University of Mass.-Amherst and the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her M.F.A. in 1992.
"I purchase pre-pulped paper from fiber houses, and I also harvest indigenous fibers and mix them with the pre-pulped paper," said Yetz. "You can use grass, but it's not very strong. Milkweed in the fall is great after it has lost its seeds. It makes a gorgeous, almost clear paper."
Once Yetz has made the paper, she casts it. "I developed my own process that uses clothing to cast from," said Yetz, who teaches art part-time at B.C.C."My work is based on garments, so it all is cast off of women's clothing and gowns. Basically, the work always deals with the female form, but without the female there. The gowns are empty. The word that has been used for them is `surrogates.'"
What interests Yetz most about these figures are questions of "body size, cultural visibility and self-acceptance," she said. "It's self-motivated. I'm a large woman and have dealt with a lot of prejudices throughout my life. My work fights against size prejudice in our culture in a quiet way. With the sculptures, I talk about body size without using the actual body so that it's less threatening.
"The drawings are always large, self-portraits that are nudes. They upset people. My mother is appalled.But they don't want to talk about it. Some are perfectly fine with it, others just don't want to deal with it."
Yetz works the late-shift for the State Department of Mental Retardation as a direct-care worker. Otherwise, life as an artist in Pittsfield, she said, is "a bit isolating. I'm just starting to meet some of the community here. Before I was always based out of a school, but without the school base I find it more difficult to meet people, other artists especially."
"I like working with compositing images from different sources," said Dan Englander, describing how he processes his digital art. "Like maybe a picture of a flag I took in New York somewhere, and a picture of a skull I took in New Mexico. Then I'll composite them together. The ultimate goal is to have a seamless integration of the two images, so it seems as if it's one image."
Englander started out doing conventional photography eight years ago, but in the last two years he has become hooked on using a MacIntosh computer, into which he scans his photographs, converting them into digital form which can then be reassembled into new composites.
Englander, 33, worked at a hardware distributor for nine years until he quit last year. "I kept reading about MacIntoshes and thought it would be neat to get into that, so I bought a Mac and ever since then I've been having a ball," he said in phone interview from his home in Albany.
"The work is very personal," said Englander, who since quitting his job has been supporting himself by waiting tables and doing free- lance work. "It's about some of my favorite places in the whole world, about me and the things I like and the people in my life and what's happened to me.
"Some of it is very therapeutic. It's art therapy, a way of getting out stuff that I need to get out of my system in a very healthy way. I tend to obsess about things at times, so it's kind of a way of dealing with them."
Englander offered as an example a self-portrait he took of himself and a girlfriend he is no longer seeing. "It's kind of a tribute to the relationship we had," he said. "I scanned it and blurred us a little bit." In addition, he superimposed on it a lyric he wrote, inspired by alternative-rock music, written in a rough, typewriter- like font. "It was therapeutic for me to do that," he said.
A theater major at New York University and Skidmore College, Englander isn't a total newcomer to the Berkshire art scene. His work has been shown at the Spazi Contemporary Fine Art and Tokonoma galleries in Housatonic. In fact, he likes it so much here, he is planning on moving to the Berkshires within weeks.
"The work I'm doing now is very abstract, quite different from what I have been doing before," said Diana Gala of her work in the Front Street show. "I had previously been working in a narrative vein, since 1979, but probably in the last six months I've done a 180- degree turn away into something very abstract that is really just coming about."
Gala, of Lenox, studied at Cooper Union in New York, U Mass-Amherst and SUNY-Albany, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree. The artist, who describes herself as "fifty-something," has been showing at Front Street since 1994, and she will have a show at the Clark- Whitney Gallery in Lenox in August.
Gala's preferred medium is oil on canvas. "It's a very visceral sensation working with oils," she said."The smell of it, the feel of it, the actual process of handling the medium, with brushes, paints, my fingers, whatever tool I use. In the last series I did I started scratching into the surface with a sharp-edged tool. I get a high on working with oils.Working with acrylics to me is like working with a dead material compared to oils, which takes on a life of its own. There's a juiciness about it."
For the last 11 years, Gala has worked as a real-estate agent. "It's difficult living here as an artist, away from the huge art markets and not having access to large galleries and large segments of a population that is very visual-art directed," she said. "Unless you have connections directly with New York City and Boston, it's extremely difficult to solely make a living with your art."
Nevetheless, Gala finds that her work as a realtor has its own creative rewards. "I have been able to use my esthetic sensibility in new home construction, and that is really what keeps me going in this business, the design aspect. The process is very simliar. Starting with the ground -- a canvas -- creating something on that ground -- a house versus a painting -- and with a finished product someone's going to live with or in."
"I like to go into cities and just wander around and just catch whatever strikes me, a sculpture, a building, funky signs, posters, anything," says Celia Coolidge about her approach to photography.
"I don't like to set up photographs," said Coolidge, whose photographs from a visit to Paris Paris last December are in the Front St. show. "I shoot as much film as I can and usually I can make discoveries in my work that way. I like that element of chance."
Coolidge contrasts her improvisatory approach to photography with that of drawing, which she also does. "When I draw I work and work and work it, and great things can come out of that, too, but it's a nice release to go out and shoot and not really think, just use my fast eye," said Coolidge, 28, of Lenox.
Coolidge began taking photographs seriously while still in high school. She is a graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and has shown her work at the Spazi Contemporary Fine Art Gallery in Housatonic, in several galleries in Oakland, San Francisco and Boulder, and at Front St., where she is one of the members. Her work has been published in the arts journal Lingo, including a collaboration with poet Michael Gizzi, of Lenox, and her father, the poet Clark Coolidge, of Hancock. Her photographs are also included in "Lowell Connector: Lines and Shots from Kerouac's Town," published by Hard Press of West Stockbridge.
"It's nice to be just a few hours from New York, and it's beautiful here this time of year, but I don't do nature photography," said Coolidge, whose work betrays her David Lynch-like fondness for "that place between humor and the bizarre."
"I like to go into cities and find combinations of things. It's fun for me to walk down the street and look at a poster in the window and see the reflection of what's behind me in the image and catch that contrast."
"Collage is for me a way to explore, not necessarily the thing I am tearing up, but the thing I am contriving to build out of torn pieces," says Keith Waldrop, whose collage art will be represented in the Front St. show.
Although Waldrop has had numerous exhibitions of his collage, he is perhaps best known as a poet, writer and translator. His recent books include "The Locality Principle" (Avec) and"Light While There Is Light" (Sun and Moon). He teaches at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and with his wife, Rosmarie Waldrop, is editor of the small press, Burning Deck.
"When working with paper," said Waldrop of his collage art, "my elements are usually torn rather than cut. A large proportion of the elements touch one or another edge, suggesting incompletion. There are tissues laid over some areas and in some cases I add paint or pencil, all of which lessen the distinctness of one element from another.
"To the extent that there is a purpose to what I do, its end is the `enjoyment of a composition,' -- a concern, as Whitehead notes, common to aesthetics and logic."
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 11, 1996. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1996. All rights reserved.]
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