"They are pictures of the elements of air, earth and water…All is without form and void. Some one said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like." (William Hazlitt on Turner)

Three Bay Area artists depict the modern landscape as seen through the prism of abstraction, with realistic elements simplified and reduced to a bare minimum. Despite the absence of description, narrative, and incident, however, all three artists achieve a visual poetry and emotion that links their work with the Romantic and symbolic "transcendental abstraction" of such painters as Friedrich, Hodler, Ernst, O'Keefe, Feininger, Gottlieb, Rothko and Newman. One writer described Rothko's work as "screens of meditations…"

"… illumined by dark light articulated only by a very few coloured fields which rise from the ground and sink back into it…. They symbolise the great, unlimited, universal space surrounding us, in which the numen [i.e., supernatural] has its place…Colours close together in the colour circle…give rise to a magically uniform light, which is nowhere directly present, but which emanates from chords of neighboring colours. The colour modulation appears to give the luminous screen a rhythmic breathing, as though some mysterious Divinity were moving behind it (Werner Haftman, Painting in the Twentieth Century).

Miya Ando Stanoff induces introspection and contemplation with her somber, becalmed nocturnal landscapes/seascapes of metal and pigment.

Sparky Campanella examines the urban landscape in his color photographs, focusing on the horizon where the man made (fences, walls, buildings) meets the natural (skies, clouds, trees). His works depict and embody "the urban dweller's romantic quest for the horizon and desire for new potential."

Susan Spies "explores the spaces where man and nature intersect" in her earth-toned oil and charcoal abstractions, suggestive of mountains and islands glimpsed through slowly evaporating clouds and fog.

Susan Spies - Shipyard Series #6 oil and charcoal - 42" x 32"

Sparky Campanella - 17th and Mission digital pigment print - 24" x 30"

Miya Ando Stanoff - 80.1 steel and pigment - 24" x 24"

Contact: Susan Spies, Curator
415-244-4466
susanspies@yahoo.com
(photos available)

DeWitt Cheng, Works Publicity Coordinator
415-412-8499 (cell)
acdcmr@earthlink.net

Jennifer Levy, Works Gallery Coordinator 408-295-8378
works_sj@yahoo.com

Established in 1977, Works/San José is a non-profit, volunteer-run contemporary art and performance center dedicated to providing a venue for artists, ideas, and images that expand the scope of cultural and artistic experience.