"Each piece of a painting should bear significance like the words of a poem - resonant, signaling."
- Martha Armstrong
Start Of Fall, 48" x 60", Oil On Canvas
The visual world is compelling. It can be overwhelming. I have a distinct early memory of standing in a crib waiting for my grandmother. I am facing a mirror and behind me is a window full of sunlight and trees reflected in the mirror. I often don’t hear things because I am looking. That is where painting starts. I am always trying to figure out how to put something down, to translate it into an image, a metaphor. Like a writer needing to put something into words.
I paint mostly landscapes. If I’m working on a large painting I go after the whole for as long as I can- days, weeks, scraping down in between, but focusing on what is out there. I work on small studies along the way trying to get an idea about the whole in my head. It is often a matter of paying such close attention, to see from the infinite number of marks you could make what you choose to put down. What did you get? I want the painting to be about a specific subject and about what is going on in my brain - intuition, feeling judgment, memory. Avoid past ideas at all costs. Invent an equivalent without premeditation.
Small studies are often complete in one session - like playing a piece of music: one move must connect to another to build a whole. The older I get the more complicated the world seems. Building a form over a long time is a way to pursue this. I don’t want a fast painting. I don’t want decoration. Painting has to carry all of history.
I was often left at the Cincinnati Art Museum as a child - a safe place. Today I travel anywhere to go to museums, to see and draw from original work. As an undergraduate I shunned authority, spent most of my time painting outside or in my room. I spent my undergraduate years trying to figure out abstraction - Kandinsky, Mondrian, Jackson Pollack. The 20th century left us with so many new ideas about painting. In 1999 I held a seminar at Hollins University to discuss what we must take into the 21st century, ideas that should not be lost. How to integrate them into thousands of years of painting?
Mackerel Sky III, 44" x 42", Charcoal On Paper
b. Cincinnati, OH, 1940
The person who taught me about art was Anneliese von Oettingen who came to Cincinnati from Germany after WW ll. She taught ballet - that an arm extended into space is as expressive as a branch of a tree in a Cezanne. They both become something else in the mind. I studied dance with her for ten years not so much to become a dancer but to learn the discipline and work of an art form.
The Cincinnati Art Museum and its Art Academy were regular havens for me from junior high through college. I studied there with Julian Stanczak, the OP Art pioneer who got me to look at Paul Klee’s Tunisian watercolors and to read John Marin’s letters to Alfred Stieglitz-- an inspired introduction from someone whose own work was so very different. At Smith College (BA 1962) I took magnificent art history classes and studied with Leonard Baskin. From there I had a glorious, liberating year at Rhode Island School of Design (MS ’63) where I studied with Robert Hamilton, Gordon Peers and Norman La Liberte. I then taught high school to put my husband Alan through law school. After two years I returned to RISD to paint, sculpt, and make prints for a blissful year.
Early Fall II, 28" x 36", Oil On Canvas
In 1966 we moved to Philadelphia where I painted in the Philadelphia Museum until our son was born. You could do that then, no one around, the guards so friendly, the heat stifling—no air conditioning. I exhibited with Stanley Lewis in the Hartford Arts Foundation “Five Young Painters Show” in 1967, about the time we moved into a small house with great views. I worked there and up the street in the car or a field. I had my first Philadelphia show at Sessler’s Gallery in 1969, a few months after our daughter Abigail was born. In 1972 I was in New York’s Kraushaar Gallery’s New Talent show. My first solo show at Gross McCleaf Gallery was in 1974 and I have continued to exhibit my work there in one-person exhibitions every two to three years.
Thanks to Estelle Gross and Sharon Ewing at Gross McCleaf I was in shows regularly at Woodmere Art Museum, Cheltenham Art Center, Allentown Art Museum, The Noyes Museum in New Jersey, The Harrisburg Arts Festival and the Philadelphia art Alliance, and others.
Fall In West Dummerston (Detail), Oil On Canvas
In the early 1980’s I began teaching with Fritz Janschka at Bryn Mawr College where I could continue to make prints. I taught a semester at Kansas City Art Institute (1982), had a retrospective at Haverford College of work in local collections (1984) then taught for four years at Indiana University in Bloomington (1986-90) where I exhibited with the IU faculty and at DePauw University, and at Sasama Brauer Gallery in Chicago. In summers I taught at Saugatuck, Michigan, for the Chicago Art Institute and at Chautauqua in Long Island for Queens College.
After the Bowery Gallery’s 1988 Invitational Show I became a gallery member. At that time I was showing with Mulligan Shanoski in San Francisco, where I was in the San Francisco International Art Expo at Fort Mason Center. In 1995 we went to Cassis, France, where I had a Camargo Foundation grant, an extraordinary experience painting on the Mediterranean with all its history. I returned to Cassis for several years thereafter and started exhibiting at Walter Wickiser’s NY Gallery. During that period I showed with Stanley Lewis at the List Gallery at Swarthmore College and at Dartmouth with Stanley, Nancy Frieze and Louisa Mattiasdottir.
In 2002 I was part of “Changing Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke” curated by Susan Danley and Martha Hoppin for the Mount Holyoke College Museum. In 2004, I was in “Imaginative Affinities: Echoes of Edwin Dickinson in Contemporary American Painting” curated by Scott Noel for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I was teaching for Ying Li at Haverford that year and invited George Nick and Lennart Anderson to speak about studying with Edwin Dickinson. I was in “The American River” traveling show organized by Cynthia Reeves for the Great River Art Institute, Walpole, NH, and “From West to Wyeth-Painting in Philadelphia” at Woodmere Museum. I began showing with Larry Elder at Elder Gallery, Charlotte, NC—a series of one-person exhibitions, the most recent in March, 2017.
I have always learned from my students. I taught at Smith for several years along with semesters at Mount Holyoke, Dartmouth, Hollins University, and Haverford College, and participated in graduate critiques atthe Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. (2007-14). I’ve been privileged to be a visiting artist at many schools. The summers of 2000-2005 I taught and exhibited at the International School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in Italy. In 2006 I was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome—a great experience where, thanks to the kindness of Director Carmela Franklin and the art historian Ili Nagy, in addition to painting the landscape I had access to the Academy’s collection of Etruscan figures. Painting from ancient sculptures continues to intrigue me-the drawing in them.
In 2014 Margaret Skove arranged the “Martha Armstrong Landscapes" exhibition at Blanden Art Museum, part of a two person show with Gerald Auten, in Fort Dodge, Iowa. About that time I showed in “The Figure” with the Midwest Paint Group, “The Common Object” with Zeuxis, and was part the “Seven on Site” show at the Pennsylvania College of Art, and in “The Lay of the Land: Contemporary Landscapes from the Collection” at the Smith College Museum of Art.
I’ve done a number of shows at Northampton’s Oxbow Gallery. At the moment, I’m preparing for a landscape show—paintings from Vermont, Arizona, Italy and Ireland-- at Gross McCleaf Gallery opening this April and another exhibition at Bowery Gallery in March of 2019. I still feel all my work is ahead of me.
Women have been the cornerstone of operations and exhibitions at Gross McCleaf since Estelle Shane Gross opened her gallery in 1970 on the second floor of 1713 Walnut Street. Over 50 years later, Gross McCleaf is commemorating its rich history during (re)Focus 2024, a citywide festival celebrating women-identified and BIPOC artists.
Fortitude at 50: A Resilient Five Decades at Gross McCleaf Gallery features Martha Armstrong, Jan Baltzell, Joan Becker, Elizabeth Geiger, Eileen Goodman, Penelope Harris, Heidi Leitzke, Bertha Leonard, Ying Li, Ann Lofquist, Chelsey Luster, Bethann Parker, Nicole Parker, Jane Piper, Kimi Pryor, Mary Putman, Celia Reisman, Val Rossman, Mickayel Thurin, Leigh Werrell, and Lauren Whearty with self-portraits, dreamy narratives and formally complex still-life and landscape paintings. The works suggest a deep reflection of the self and a strong point of view conveyed through their distinct subjects and styles. The exhibition represents women artists in all stages of their careers who have helped shape the Gross McCleaf legacy and brand focus toward what Sharon Ewing, former owner and director, refers to as “painterly realism” – representation in painted form.
Long before recorded history, humans identified divinity in the natural world. Across the globe, cave paintings and petroglyphs represent the land, the animals and the supernatural. Prehistoric burial mounds and henges of Northern Europe align with equinoxes and solstices. At Newgrange in Ireland, decorated stone carvings record the phases of the moon and depict rays emerging over the horizon at sunrise. Contemporary viewers can only infer the exact meanings of these monumental relics, etched with waves, spirals and diamonds juxtaposed with recognizable imagery.
As contemporary innovation, architecture, technology and design increasingly position each person as the master of their own exclusive universe, the artists in Concerning The Spiritual In Landscape have humbly venerated the life-giving light, ever-present matter and perpetual cycles of nature that bring forth all things.
“I have a longing for a certain beauty that’s hard to describe, but it’s usually associated with summer colors. My desire for this summertime feeling seems inexhaustible, and though I’ve been trying for many years, I don’t feel like I am ever really satisfied.”
- Kurt Moyer
For over a decade, Kurt Moyer’s work has combined his love of nature with his reverence for art history. Born in Southeastern Pennsylvania, Moyer spent much of his youth exploring the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania. Moyer now resides in rural New York near Rochester where he spends his time plein air painting from the beginning of spring until late fall. These passions converge in Moyer’s new abstract paintings on view at Gross McCleaf...
Gross McCleaf Gallery is showing works by Maryland-based Nicole Parker in her first solo exhibition in Philadelphia. Titled “Thresholds”, her paintings are portals that allow a viewer to travel through conceptual thresholds into surrogate realities. “I love human spaces like houses, buildings and public transport, and am interested in the ‘footprints’ and evidence of ourselves that we always manage to leave. Every place and object is a story or an artifact.” Also on view in February is “Trees, Seas and Objects” a major solo exhibition of new paintings by Martha Armstrong. In addition to landscapes, the current exhibition will feature a selection of still-life paintings, subject matter which Armstrong has long-explored but rarely displayed.
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to announce a major solo exhibition of new paintings by gallery artist, Martha Armstrong and Nicole Parker's first solo exhibition in Philadelphia.
Armstrong’s muscular shapes and energetic compositions are hers alone to claim – a style that she’s developed and faithfully preserved over many decades. Her work harkens back to early American Modernists like Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove and contemporary artists like Lois Dodd and Richard Diebenkorn. One can also see the influence of European movements such as Cubism and Fauvism.
Nicole Parker’s oil paintings depict images that are on the verge of dreaming and wakefulness. The pictures are recognizable yet tend to drift into the uncanny valley – where what one sees looks to be natural and realistic but then morphs into a phantasmagoria of enigmatic imagery. Parker’s worlds contain houses, rooms, and vehicles that allude to a world made for humans, yet there are no people to be found. Rather, these spaces subtly summon the viewer to become the lone inhabitant of each scene.
Painting from nature is nearly as old as the hills. For years, Alex Katz was the most prominent keeper of its flame, but other devotees have lately come into clearer view — Mr. Katz’s contemporary, the great Lois Dodd, for one. In addition, younger painters like Maureen Gallace and the even younger Daniel Heidkamp and Aliza Nisenbaum have wholeheartedly or partly followed suit. Painting from various forms of life has become a thing — as they say — in the hipper reaches of the contemporary art world.
