The Art Scene: 02.27.14
Workshops at the Parrish
The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill is offering two new workshops for artists of all skill levels during March. Linda Capello, an artist from Sag Harbor whose work focuses on the figure, will teach life drawing in a four-session series beginning Wednesday from 3 to 5 p.m. and concluding March 26. Participants will draw male and female models through gesture sketches and longer observation. The cost is $120 for four classes, $95 for Parrish members.
Barbara Thomas, who lives and works in East Hampton, will teach a four-session painting class exploring color, composition, and technique from Friday, March 7, from 4 to 6:30 p.m., through March 28. The workshop will include visits to the galleries for observation and drawing and studio time using gouache, watercolor, oil, or water-based oil to create still-life paintings. The series costs $250, $200 for members.
Enrollment for both classes is limited. Registration is at parrishart.org.
Dan Christensen in New York
Dan Christensen, an abstract painter who rose to prominence in the 1960s, will have an exhibition at Spanierman Modern in New York from next Thursday through April 2. Titled “Sprays and Stains,” the show will feature the innovative paintings Christensen created from the late 1960s until his death in 2007. A reception will take place next Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m.
Throughout his 40-year career, Christensen explored and helped define the possibilities of paint and pictorial form. Along with such contemporaries as Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Helen Frankenthaler, and Morris Louis, his work was part of movements the critic Clement Greenberg termed Post-Painterly Abstraction or Color Field painting. Christensen was one of the first painters to employ the spray gun in his work, and he experimented with staining and other innovative techniques.
Christensen’s paintings are in many public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He died in Springs, where he had lived with his wife, Elaine Grove, an artist and actress.
New in Bridgehampton
A new exhibition at the Bridgehampton Museum offers a visual alternative to this winter’s persistent snows. Watercolor paintings by Bernard Springsteel, an artist from the North Fork, capture the beauty of the old barns, houses, and watercraft of the East End. The exhibition will be on view at the Corwith House through April 25.
The museum will also host, during March and April, “George B. Brainerd’s Bridgehampton Scrapbook, ca. 1878,” 11 vintage photographs of the Bridgehampton area taken by the Brooklyn photographer in the late 19th century. The exhibition, installed in the museum’s archives building, is on loan from the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.
The Parlor Jazz series resumes on Friday, March 7, at 7:30 p.m., when Greg Galavotti, Jane Hastay, and Peter Martin Weiss will perform in the museum’s archives building. Tickets cost $25, $15 for members, and reservations have been strongly recommended.