Celia Johnson – Encaustic

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Abstract, Celia Johnson, CT, Encaustic, FREDGIAMPIETROGALLERY, New Haven, Painting

We are thrilled to be working with artist Celia Johnson! Read below to learn more about her inspirations and working process. Examples of her work are on view now through October 17th, at FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery, 1064 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT

“As a child, I carefully collected stones, leaves and scraps into neat bundles of vivid similarities, and hoarded muslin bags bursting with glossy jewel-like marbles. But above all I lived and breathed for my Colorforms with the geometric Paul Rand logo, far preferring them to crayons.

I was already hooked on saturated color and pure geometry.

Color as form and pattern, juxtaposed elements and their relational situations, these were interests that I wanted to explore as an art student, but it was challenging finding the right path. I was drawn to both design and painting, but I became increasingly conflicted over pursuing painting due to my lack of interest in generating representational or narrative imagery such as figures, scenes or familiar objects. I could not reconcile this reluctance and struggled in my inexperience to search for a painting problem to explore, engage and resolve.

Developing a personal language of abstraction and putting it to work had to be grown into for me as an artist. I began to find my way only when I realized that the subject of my work can in fact be the work in progress itself: its evolving shapes, forms and colors accumulating to articulate a document of myself at a given moment in time. With this realization in mind I began to conquer my doubt and move forward by creating controlled, small, intimate work in wax, oils, gouache and saturated silkscreen inks.

I like to organize visual structure, and I start the exploration by utilizing both analog and digital collage. Here I explore form in both deconstruction and recombination, in redundancy and repeat, testing the balance and tension within figure-ground relationships. Through this method I gradually construct my distinct form-in-form compositions of formal and chromatic components. These are built into layered, structured fields of color, and as I proceed, one composition suggests another.

I enjoy persuading liquid paints, inks and hot glowing wax into counterintuitively distinct, bound, or embedded fields of pure saturated color.” – Celia Johnson

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Click here to view more of Celia Johnson’s works

www.giampietrogallery.com/CeliaJohnson

Archive – Wonderful article written by Michael Valinsky about Clint Jukkala’s work at Volta NY 2015

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Abstract, Clint Jukkala, CT, FREDGIAMPIETROGALLERY, New Haven, Painting

Don’t miss your chance to see Clint Jukkala’s most recent work, on view now through October 17th at Fred.Giampietro Gallery, 1064 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT

A Curious Play on Memory and Perception at Fred Giampietro Gallery’s VOLTA NY Presentation

At this year’s VOLTA NY Fred Giampietro Gallery offers a dynamic duo presentation featuring artists Jonathan Waters and Clint Jukkala, which will include a mixture of painting and sculpture, all centered around the theme of experience.

ARTSY EDITORIAL

MAR 4TH, 2015 12:33 AM

Each artist’s respective works initially appear to be antithetical, with one focusing on color and illusion and the other on structure and matter. However, both artists are interested in the ways in which we see things and how each perceived object can be seen from the perspective of a personal history. Jukkala’s work, while relying heavily on color to produce optical effects, employs amorphous shapes that are difficult to decipher. In his artist’s statement, he explains: “they tend to suggest eyes, goggles and periscopes—things to look through or things looking out.” It is precisely this idea of looking that makes Jukkala’s work so compelling; the viewer is never exactly sure what he or she is looking at, and is presented with the choice to mentally enter the scene or simply observe it. Like a landscape painting, Jukkala’s work asks the viewer to discern what the focal point of the piece is and provides many different options to choose from.

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  Clint Jukkala

  Sun Globe, 2014

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  Jonathan Waters

  Hornhead, 2015

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  Clint Jukkala

  Peculiar Velocity, 2014

On a similar note, Waters also produces works that consider the act of seeing, yet rather than relying on the viewer, as Jukkala’s works do, his works are born from his own experiences. Inspired by many years he spent living and working on a freight ship, Waters injects his works with references to nautical life. The resulting works, sharp, geometric sculptures and two-dimensional assemblages, incorporate elements of the hard-edged style and hints of 1970s-era minimalism. While exploring both paper and steel, and their respective textures, Waters develops a melancholic tone in his works, which the viewer experiences primarily through his use of color; this is where a dialogue between the two artists develop

• Jukkala’s more vibrant tones offer a balance to Waters’s darker ones, and both combine produce a conversation on relationships between viewer and artwork and color and form. On the one hand, Jukkala asks us to use our imagination and become submerged in the canvas in order to experience it, and on the other, Waters beckons us to move around his works and observe the fruits of his own experiences. Due to this intriguing pairing, Fred Giampietro’s VOLTA NY presentation promises a stimulating study that makes the viewer question the way we look at art.

—Michael Valinsky