AMERICAN ART COLLECTOR
Exhibition Previews
November 2011

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: Click here to view PDF of this article:

http://www.adamcavefineart.com/news/birdsofafeather.pdf

NORTH RALEIGH NEWS
News 
1 November 2011

BIRDS AT CENTER OF CONTRASTING STYLES
By Chelsea Kellner

A pair of four-eyed beauties in Japanese robes float across blue sky on the backs of two white cranes in flight. It’s a stylized painting, surreal, like something seen in a dream.

On another wall, there’s a black-capped chickadee on a painted abstract perch, so lifelike it looks ready to chirp and fly away.

Two artists offer their vision of birds at this month’s First Friday event at Adam Cave Fine Art downtown. Raleigh-based Tisha Weddington paints symbolic canvases of birds and women designed to be interpreted by the viewer. Byron Gin’s birds are so detailed they look like photographs, set against playful splashes of abstract color.

“Byron is playing off of documentation,” Cave said. “Tisha is playing off of the mythological element birds bring. But they’re both always exploring in their paintings.”

In Weddington’s art, animals are often used to bring masculine energy to her paintings, Cave said, which often center around a female figure.

Her birds can also serve that purpose, but just as often they are light, flitting or perched gently on an outstretched hand.

“I love for people to come up with their own stories, to narrate my images as they wish,” Weddington said.

Weddington is inspired by Japanese prints, bullfighting posters, old circus prints. She doesn’t have her own stories for the paintings. She works intuitively, with layers of drawing and paint.

“We all bring baggage to everything we see,” Cave said. “When a painter works in a simpler, more stylized style as Tisha’s doing, we’re able to read more into it.”

Gin, who is based in Chicago, has degrees in both art and environmental science and says he gathers inspiration from day-to-day life – like the birds on his backyard feeder.

Viewers have a strong response to paintings that incorporate birds, Cave said. There’s precedent for that in art history. From Renaissance art to the peace movement, doves and other birds have strong symbolic meaning.

There’s also a spiritual element – the Bible features doves, ravens and other birds playing key roles in important events from the Great Flood to the blessing of Jesus. In Native American tradition, an eagle or other bird can serve as one’s spirit animal.

Plus there’s the frenetic energy associated with birds that brings a sense of movement to any painting, Cave said.

“It gives the viewer the sense that, if the artist has frozen the moment, it’s only for a fraction of a second, because birds don’t stand still,” Cave said. “That brings a sense of life to the canvas.”

INDEPENDENT WEEKLY
Visual Art
16 March 2011

WINTER KUDZU, SPRING KNIVES: AT ADAM CAVE AND LUMP GALLERIES, A WARMING TREND
By Chris Vitiello

After a bitter winter, spring has graced the Triangle, which means daffodils, forsythia and new art in Raleigh’s galleries. Before the blossoms and fresh air lure you out into the sun, take in some of the beautiful, obsessive artwork currently on display.

Adam Cave Fine Art is showing a pair of image-makers, Diana Bloomfield and Donald Furst, whose processes inform their works with mysterious qualities that will move you to want to become an initiate.

Diana Bloomfield’s pinhole and alternative-process photography endows her subjects with a hyperrealism. Many of the images are the result of a multicolor gum bichromate process that dates to the 1850s and produces a unique print. This process—which can take days—is similar to offset printing. She brushes an emulsion containing watercolor pigment onto paper, exposes it with a separation negative, develops it and then does it again, layering a different color.

Bloomfield reveals this process in a stunning quartet of portraits of pinned moths and flies. The insects appear neatly within a white square, around which Bloomfield’s emulsion brushstrokes are left visible. This chaotic rainbow perimeter plays foil to the calm images of the perfectly spread luna moth and damselfly, transforming them into kept secrets. A slight imprecision in registration of the colors lends an animate blur to the nocturnal moth, which must vibrate its wings to heat up its flight muscles in the absence of radiant sunlight.

Bloomfield also uses a complicated “platinum over pigment” process, which is explained on a lengthy gallery sheet. But the technical information isn’t necessary to admire the work. It’s her compositional eye in “Winter Kudzu” that recognizes a fascinating undulation in the leafless mesh of vines on bare trees. The platinum gives a radiant Polaroid darkness to the print, which plays up the threatening nature of the viral, ubiquitous plant.

Donald Furst’s engravings and lithography glow with dreamlike potential but resist surrealism. The perspective of his interiors is located in a darkened room that includes an open door to a lighted hallway. Or the image vanishes into a darkening passageway that dimly reveals a corner at its depth. Every doorway permits a swath of light in, which allows Furst to show his virtuosic skill at achieving gradations of gray.

Neither claustrophobic nor creepy, these empty rooms and disappearing corridors are more like being locked in an M.C. Escher office building overnight than stuck in a cyclical David Lynch set. Upon scrutiny, an elaborate mirror trick is perceptible in “Echolalia,” giving the sense of infinite iteration. But in a vitreograph titled “Strive? II,” steps terminate in blind walls, and suspended disintegrating ladders lead nowhere. The meditative precision of Furst’s process becomes slightly anxious in several miniature mezzotints only a couple of inches wide.

Currently the chair of the departments of art and art history at UNC-Wilmington, where he has taught since 1985, Furst possesses an astounding intaglio repertoire. His 13 images include woodcuts, mezzotints, lithographs and etchings. The woodcut “Higher Than” merits a visit all by itself. Put your nose an inch from its surface and scrutinize the detail in an area of treetops from which hewn ladders protrude. Then pick your lower jaw up from the floor.

ARTSEE MAGAZINE
Emerging
November / December 2010

IT’S ALL GOODYEAR
By Chris Vitiello

And what is the predicament of the painter, a decade into the 21st century? After Modernists and Postmodernists have fought wars over abstraction and representation across canvasses now quietly hung in museums, what weapons, bandages, and tools remain for the contemporary studio painter to deploy?

Will Goodyear would answer, “All of them.”

Goodyear’s recent paintings can be read as an archive of the last 150 years of art, from the painterly gesture and the early days of photography, through improvisational elements of Abstract Expressionist non-objectivity, into a digital era in which images flutter through contexts like phantoms. On wooden panels layered with paint, beeswax, charcoal, oil pastel, and even tobacco juice, screen-printed buildings and historical scenes crouch beneath and jut into resonant skies. Upon eye contact, one is drawn into their atmospheric multiplicity, moving physically closer to them in order to see details open up.

Goodyear resolves these disparate aesthetics within uncomplicated compositions, the classical structure of which may be buried beneath literally ten or more layers. Balanced and simultaneous, these paintings stand as examples of why a trapeze artist is still called an artist.

Usually, at the beginning of an artist’s profile, their location is given with the word “based” after it, but even location is multiple right now for the 31-year-old Goodyear. He commutes several times a week between Greenville, where he is completing an MFA at East Carolina University and opening his thesis show November 5 at Emerge Gallery, and Raleigh, where he lives with his wife Debra and their young daughter Ainsley and shows work at Adam Cave Fine Art.

This commute leaves a visible, even filmic, impression on Goodyear’s paintings. The repetitive rushing-past of loblolly pines; the omnipresent sky, both exhilarating and ominous; the music blaring from the car’s stereo, ambivalent to the hurtling landscape—all of this informs a calm simultaneity in Goodyear’s work. If you’ve driven an eastern North Carolina interstate, you know this comfortable disorientation. It might not look like you’re getting anywhere regardless of your speedometer’s readout, but the landscape you’re speeding through is rich and varied, and eventually you arrive at your destination.

Goodyear himself is always both arriving and leaving. On the verge of finishing his studies, he’s living in both the present and the future, culminating his three years of school while seeking studio space and a new community of artists in the state capital. The key to his balancing it all is in those resonant skies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journal entry that “The sky is the daily bread of the eyes” rings true in Goodyear’s work. Color fields, whether hovering above overlapping skylines of contemporary Raleigh and Seattle or above turn-of-the-century rioters in Wilmington, occupy the majority of the paintings’ areas. They contrast the congested, urban areas constructed at the bottom of the picture. “It gives your eye a definite place to rest,” Goodyear explains. “You can look at all of this stuff down here and try to take it all in. And you can always retreat to this large area of a more peaceful aesthetic. I could describe that as my own little retreat.”

There’s nothing simple, however, about these skies. The intensely worked and layered surfaces change as one walks toward or away from them and the different materials at different layers of the mix emerge.

Gallery owner Adam Cave, who showed Goodyear’s work along with that of Annemarie Gugelmann in the “Metropolitans” show this past October, carries a painting from room to room to display its optical complexities: “I have never had an artist whose work changes color so dramatically from daylight to electric lights. Because he puts a lot of very strong color underneath, and covers it up, different kinds of lights pull it out.”

Cave points to Seattle Study, which appears to be a nightscape. “This painting goes from the very dark, somber, umber quality you see here in daylight to, when it’s all electric light, completely green. Its brightness is so strong that it doesn’t seem that much darker than this painting here.” Cave points to Large Building, Larger Sky, a diptych on hollow-core doors featuring Raleigh’s Wachovia building beneath an unmistakable Carolina noon.

“I work really quickly and really up close while the materials are wet, to build up layers without thinking too much about the composition or formal characteristics,” Goodyear says of his process. “Everything is done with a sense of immediacy.”

Although outlining and tracing finds its way into the work in small ways, Goodyear employs neither drawing nor collage in any way. His literal images come solely from screen printing, polymer lift, and Xerox transfer techniques.

“A lot of unpredictable things happen in the transfer process,” he explains. “You lose a lot of the image and then you can pull it back. Once I put that imagery down, drawing helps to fill in some of the gaps, and to bridge the two worlds: the photo imagery with the gestural paint and texture.”

The unpredictability and disrupted imagery is as much for the mind as for the eye. When Goodyear fragments or complicates a historical image, he is representing its social complexity as well, while avoiding painting from a soapbox.

This fall, he is hanging his thesis show, which explores the idea of the public monument, focusing specifically on how Charles Aycock—North Carolina’s governor from 1901 to 1905—has been memorialized and misremembered. In ten pieces, some inset within a large wall engraved with Aycock’s words, Goodyear deals with both Aycock’s legacy as an advocate of public education, and his uncelebrated white supremacist platform and involvement in the 1898 Wilmington race riots. “There’s very little out there in the form of public monument that tells anything else about his public legacy,” he points out.

In a work entitled A Champion of Public Education, Amongst Other Things, Goodyear’s layered sky around a bronze statue of Aycock can be read as being stained with either the blood of rioters or legislative ink, or simply as a weathered parchment in a public square.

Goodyear also gathers images that document or refer to the rest of the story. His research is not so much aimed at truth-telling as it is at complicating the idea of a one-to-one correspondence between memorial and man, and more generally, image and meaning. Multiple historical moments dwell in one painting, proximate and interpenetrated, because their politics are irresolvable. In the end, a monument really only stares back.

Occasionally, Goodyear’s research literally determines the materiality of the paintings—some of the Aycock-related work contains layers of tobacco stains, emphasizing the link between the political machinery of eastern North Carolina and the economic fuel that powers it. “Aesthetics are wonderful, but I hope to be able to add some depth and deal with some actual issues,” Goodyear says.

He has already placed a few paintings in corporate or work environments around the Triangle, and done commissions “dealing with the visuals of that particular place, dealing with what the people see who live there, work there.” Expressing his aspirations for a painting in an office building lobby, he says “It’s basically fancy wallpaper, but hopefully a handful of people are forming some kind of connections with it. Whatever I have to say is pretty much useless if I’m the only one looking at it.”

Cave sees big things in his future: “Will has demonstrated over and over again that he has the chops, the staying power, the focus, the professionalism—and he was doing it prior to going back to school.”

Goodyear’s paintings reward multiple viewings over time, and provoke considerations of one’s place and its history. Regardless of how his personal transitions affect the imagery and ideas on the panels, his work will exemplify Ezra Pound’s assertion that great art is “news that stays news.”

NORTH RALEIGH NEWS
News
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

THIS ARTIST’S FOCUS IS CAROLINA SCENES
By Chelsea Kellner – Staff Writer

In Portugal, Joseph Cave painted bright light falling on red earth and tiled roofs, casting crisp shadows, unfiltered by the ever-present humidity of his boyhood home in the South. On the California coast, he captured grand vistas backed by mountains, with more of that pure, clear light. But when he moved back to the Carolinas 20 years ago, his work changed. “Here, the light is much softer,” Cave said. “Painting becomes much more intimate.”

A show of Cave’s work capturing the cafes and cotton fields of North and South Carolina will open this weekend at the Adam Cave Fine Art gallery on East Hargett Street as part of the First Friday event downtown. With the galleries and restaurants of downtown Raleigh open late at the once-a-month event, Cave is one of many artists whose work art lovers can peruse by strolling the streets and watching for the First Friday flags to identify participating venues.

At Cave’s show, locals may recognize the Berkeley Cafe, painted under a blue sky with the skyscrapers of downtown in the background, or Logan’s flower market from Seaboard Station, said Adam Cave, gallery owner and the artist’s son. He also specializes in coastal scenes and floral paintings.

“It’s subject matter that people love and understand and respond to,” Adam Cave said. “It doesn’t require a master’s degree in art history to understand it.”

Cave’s style has undergone a dramatic revolution since his days as an art student at the University of Georgia in 1954. Cave started out as an abstract expressionist, working in an isolated cubicle facing a blank wall with his inner life as the only material from which to draw inspiration.

“Doing something that had never been done before was the preoccupation, but it was almost like all the doors had been opened and closed by the time I came along,” Cave said. “You were always seen to be parroting somebody who was already established.”

After a stint in the Army, Cave enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute to learn from a group called the Bay Area Figurative Painters who were gaining renown for their return to using subjects in their artwork.

“It had dawned on me that you could have more stimulation if you reverted to nature, because it’s always different and challenging,” Cave said.

Being able to paint from life was more fun, he said, especially because his abstract training had taught him how to work with only color and lines to design a compelling canvas.

Cave’s work in the Carolinas has been praised as “splendor without sentimentality” by Jim Fitch, director of the Rice Museum in Georgetown, S.C. The phrase appears in an essay Fitch penned for the first book of Cave’s paintings just published by his son’s gallery.

Cave’s work has been much collected locally in his two decades painting North Carolina. His work has hung in local restaurants and sports stadiums, as well as in private homes. Greensboro real estate developer Alex Gold owns six of Cave’s canvases. He can’t quite pinpoint what it is he loves about their depiction of scenes around Hillsborough and Apex, but in 20 years, he hasn’t tired of them.

“Picasso is out of my price range, but Joe Cave is the next best thing, as far as I’m concerned,” Gold said. “They have a depth to them I really enjoy.”

INDEPENDENT WEEKLY
Visual Art 
13 MAY 2009

STRONG SHOWS AT FLANDERS 311 AND ADAM CAVE FINE ART
Story Time
By Dave Delcambre

Fables and Fantasy
Adam Cave Fine Art
Through May 26

The prints of John D. Gall on view at Adam Cave Fine Art through May 26 conversely are so visually cohesive as to seem inseparable. This is despite the fact that the artist has deployed a variety of media including intaglio, pen and ink, watercolor, and woodcut. In fact it is Gall’s aim to pursue a profound sense of storytelling in his work, and his overarching narrative qualities are inescapable.

Rendered in golden hues that evoke the feeling of aged prints and antique parchments, the works explore such left-brain concepts as mathematics, engineering and alphabetic letters. Gall’s prints are populated by a cast of characters (usually bald and mustachioed middle-aged men bearing more than a little family resemblance to one another) engaged in all sorts of construction and investigative busy-work activities. Simple machines like levers, pulleys and scales are put to use along with a variety of scaffolding and rigging devices. Notably, the words “seeker” and “knowledge” recur frequently, attached to all but a handful of works. Mythical places such as Babel are presented (although most of the settings are more ambiguous) along with anatomical and scientific diagrams that appear like pages seemingly torn out of Leonardo’s sketchbook.

The quirkiness of the bald characters and their metaphorical pursuits of information and understanding convey an animated feeling of challenging concepts. Much like the graphic symbols of mathematics and language he employs in his work, Gall’s prints tackle some heavy subjects while nimbly navigating a sense of timelessness within our humanity.

INDEPENDENT WEEKLY
Visual Art 
July 30, 2008

OLD AND NEW PHOTOGRAPHY TECHNIQUES AT ADAM CAVE FINE ART
The Image Endures 
By Dave Delcambre

The camera lens is often understood as a mechanism for capturing exacting, unforgiving and unemotional views of our surroundings. “The camera doesn’t lie,” the saying goes.

But the Four Photographers exhibit on view at Adam Cave Fine Art dispels this notion and demonstrates the tremendous varieties of emotive image-making that photography actually encompasses. Recent years have brought dramatic change to the medium: Digital cameras and printing techniques have fundamentally altered the way photography is done. With a foot in both the 19th and 21st centuries, this show succeeds by showing the contrast between digital techniques with more traditional methods and affording us a thumbnail glimpse of photography’s past and present. Examples of time-honored, laborious photographic processes such as platinum printing and cyanotypes co-exist alongside C-prints and the latest digital technologies

The four artists included in the show explore the time-honored subjects—landscape, still life and the human figure—but in often unconventional ways. DIANA BLOOMFIELD, for example, works with the lensless pinhole cameras, and she also utilizes antique methods of printing such as platinum prints and cyanotype. Her choice of subject matter echoes Romanticism, particularly the moody, emotive landscapes in works such as “Middle Island” and “Lake Ellis Simon at Dusk.”

ANDREW ROSS is also involved with landscape imagery, but he’s preoccupied by the individual’s place within it. His urban scenes typically depict one or very few figures moving about among streetscapes or along building facades. Isolation and solitude come to mind. Due to his shot selection, exquisite timing and the softly focused edges in his prints, his photographs have the distinct qualities of architectural models—they play tricks with scale and depth of field. One can’t help but feel empathy with his figures and implicated in their plight.

The work of STEPHEN AUBUCHON is ethereal in essence in the sense that he is studying the fleeting body in motion. His dancer photos, such as “Supplication” and “Etude,” have a whirling feel, while a pair of beach landscapes rounds out his works in the show: In their dusky twilight, there’s a chromatic unification of beach, sea and sky.

The 21st century comes most explicitly into view with the work of KIM ELLEN KAUFFMAN, who pushes the boundaries of photography by eliminating the camera itself. Rather, she uses a scanner as a type of camera and captures images of leaves, plant stems, seeds and other flora. A work like “Frabrication” exhibits how, once scanned, the image has then been imported into photo manipulation software such as Photoshop to create a richly textured and lush final digital printed image.

The exhibit at Adam Cave Gallery makes us consider where the fixing of images is heading. Will there always be room for the handcrafted work of art in the digital age? This show gives cause for optimism.

NEWS & OBSERVER
Arts
Sunday, May 25th, 2008

ARTIST EMBRACES NATURE 
By J. Peder Zane, Staff Writer

RALEIGH – Nathaniel Hester says he wants to create art full of “mystery and wonder.” On that score the Raleigh native’s new exhibit is a great success.
The 30 kaleidoscopic silkscreen prints that make up “Animal Farm” bear straightforward titles, including “Beaver,” “Buck,” “Snake” and “Zebra.” The mystery is locating those familiar figures amidst the colorful abstract shapes. You crane your head from side to side, step close then way back, wondering, huhn?

Eventually you realize you’re playing a fool’s game. Sure, “Flamingo” has plenty of pink, and “Goose” does look like a bird. But Hester’s prints are not a jigsaw-puzzle test, challenging viewers to find the familiar in a whir of playful abstraction. They invite us to look beyond feathers, beaks and snouts and consider how we think and feel about these members of his menagerie.

“I made a list of about 35 favorites, animals that I have a particular relationship with,” he said in a recent interview.

“Crab” was inspired by a visit to Manteo 25 years ago when he dipped chicken necks into a marsh to lure crabs. “Cow” includes a big black rectangle because when Hester looks at a field of cows they appear rectangular.

His connection to nature runs deep. In 2005 he began living on the remote, 500-acre farm in Person County his family has owned for nine generations. Before the buyout, they grew tobacco; now they lease much of the land for cattle and wheat.

Hester, 31, and his wife, Saralynn, 25, keep bees and grow fruits and vegetables on the land he visited often while growing up in the Cameron Park section of Raleigh. After graduating from Broughton High School, Hester went to Rice University in hopes of becoming an agronomist.

His life took a different path thanks to an unlikely source. The Rotary Club sent him on a trip to Raleigh’s sister city in France, Compiègne, where he fell in love with the Louvre Museum during visits to Paris.

He switched his major to art history and French studies. After graduation, he earned a fellowship from Rice that landed him back in Paris.

Through the next six years he studied various art forms — animation, bookmaking, oil painting, printmaking, woodblocking — in France; New York; San Francisco; Kyoto, Japan; and Boston University.

While embracing the notion of avant-garde, he concluded that it had been sidetracked. “The safest thing you can do today is to try to shock somebody,” Hester said. “I didn’t want to live in that ironic disposition, what the critic Hilton Kramer calls the ‘free-floating hostility to life itself.’ I wanted to make felt, earnest work about what I saw and experienced but that wasn’t autobiographical.”

His art has been showcased at 11 shows across the country and is part of the permanent collection at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.

In 2006 he completed a series of 100 paintings titled “Ship of Fools,” which was inspired by Shelby Foote’s novels about the Civil War. They encompassed identifiable events, such as the Siege of Vicksburg and the sinking of the Merrimac and “more abstract motifs like what maritime battle might have felt like.”

Last year he executed another 100-painting project, “Garden Delights,” inspired by the history of NASA. “Space travel is part of our blood-thirst to know and control everything, to map the known world,” he said.

After those challenging projects, Hester said he wanted to do something “joyous and fun.” The result was the lobster, loons and bunny rabbits of “Animal Farm.”

“Some of them are mysterious, some of them are silly,” he said. “But all them are honest.”