Join the Conversation with Phillips' Mill ArtTalk

Al Gury can paint anything: portraits and figures, floral still lifes, landscapes. Any subject in his hands shows the confidence and surety of an artist who’s been painting from a very young age. His oeuvre is vast, and yet he is still exploring. Al delights in the expressive possibilities of color and how it can be orchestrated in dynamic compositions.

Al Gury is the chairman of the Painting Department at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He was designated a master teacher by both the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and American Artist magazine. He received his BA in fine arts and humanities from Saint Louis University, a four-year Certificate in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), and an MFA from the University of Delaware.

He is a recipient of the Cresson Traveling Fellowship and numerous grants and awards for painting and arts education. Al’s work is regularly shown by F.A.N. Gallery in Philadelphia. His paintings have also been exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Washington and Lee University, the University of Pennsylvania, and galleries across the country.

Al is a contributing editor for Per Contra, an international journal of arts, literature and ideas, and the author of three books on painting and drawing.

Since 1972, Al has resided in Philadelphia, where he works to promote the arts and is a longtime volunteer and contributor to PAWS, the Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society.

A lovely feather is on display. You consider it, admiring its beauty yet wonder why it was put on display. Then it dawns on you that it’s not actually a feather. It’s a piece of wood. How did contemporary artist Miriam Carpenter manage to carve the errant curve of the stray barbs so delicately in a rugged material like wood? Her skill is such that the result is utterly convincing. Her deep knowledge of her medium enables her to turn wood into a feather. In so doing she invites us to consider the nature of the feather and the character of the wood.

Miriam Carpenter says her work looks closely at objects often overlooked, “unveiling the hidden complexities around us.” Her love for wood is paramount, but she works also with marble and metal. She works with such a high level of precision that ironically her pieces appear easy and simple, breathtakingly so.

After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design, the Pipersville native began her career as a furniture maker at George Nakashima Woodworkers studio. Working with Mira Nakashima she learned to read the life of a tree through its knots, veins and rings. Miriam has had a solo show at Michener Art Museum. She’s also exhibited at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Wharton Esherick Museum, Fuller Craft Museum, Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum, Museum for Art in Wood, Philadelphia International Airport, SOFA Chicago and Design Miami/Paris. She has been awarded six international residencies in the arts and is an active participant in artist collaborations around the globe.

Jenny Schaeffer’s well known around Bucks County as the owner of Phoenix Art Supplies and Framing. She’s been helping artists with their material needs, framing and even with submitting to Phillips’ Mill’s Juried Art Show. Jenny has been a great friend to the community. She’s also an artist herself who has participated many times in the Phillips’ Mill Juried Art Show. Jenny is comfortable in many media, often painting in abstract. We’ll talk with Jenny about her art and what inspires her. We’ll touch on her previous incarnation as a face painter. Also, as artists prepare their work for the 95th Phillips’ Mill Juried Art Show, Jenny can talk about the importance of framing, which — depending on the juror or the buyer — can make or break a “sale.”

Jenny Schaeffer has been in framing for 40 years, at Phoenix for over 14 of them. Jenny has been a great friend to artists in our region, supporting them in their supply needs as well as running the popular annual “40 ART” show in which all works are 5” x 7” pieces that are sold for $40. Jenny studied at Raritan Community College.

Each oil painting Dot Bunn creates is the result of a long process of planning and study that is not only the preparation of that subject and design. It includes the years of developing her technical tools developed in a practice of oil painting. She believes spontaneity and intuition are best paired with a strong background in drawing and value management. She has studied the skills and lessons of the masters in order to be ability to express that intangible sense of life that comes through in her work.

It’s paid off. Dot is a Signature Member of the Oil Painters of America and is regularly juried into their shows. She’s exhibited in the Allied Artists of American Annual Juried Show at the National Arts Club and the American Artists Professional League Grand National Exhibition, as well as at Phillips’ Mill where she regularly wins awards. Her work is in the corporate collections of Byers Choice, Bohler Engineering and the Korean Delegation of Nam Dong.

Dot credits her mentors Myron Barnstone and Patrick Connors with giving her not just technical tools for her art but also in changing the way she thinks about art generally.

Join us as we chat with award-winning photographer and multimedia producer Thom Goertel, who is the juror for the 2024 Phillips' Mill Photographic Exhibition.

Working on projects for corporations, institutions, NGOs and publications, Thom has shot in locations ranging from the White House in D.C. to dung huts in Uganda. His work has been published in National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among others, and has been shown in galleries across the U.S., and is part of several private collections.

Beyond photography, Thom worked as a 3-D animator, motion graphics artist and art director.

Thom’s recent photo work includes documentary humanitarian projects in Kenya, Uganda and central Mexico, as well as his daily exploration and exploitation of the camera in his pocket.

Our guest, Sean Mount, is a self-taught oil and watercolor painter, and a naturalist who has been foraging for mushrooms, in particular, all his life. Ornithology is of specific interest to him, too. Known for his paintings of foggy winter woods and sun-dappled creeks, his work builds on the rich legacy of New Hope School Impressionism with honesty and innovative unsentimentally.

Sean received a 2019 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. After a career as a decorative painter and muralist, he spent a decade in New York City working in film and television as a scenic artist. There, he won three Art Director’s Guild Awards for his work on "Mr Robot" and "The Night Of."

ArtTalk goes back to the clay studio with the ever-engaging Lisa Naples. Lisa is a modern-day Beatrix Potter sculptor with an edge. Her creations are often animals that draw you in with their charm. Imagine rabbits and owls and crows in human situations dealing with human questions. A bird looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. It’s titled, “Is That All I Am?” Two rabbits with birds on their backs touch noses getting to know each other. It’s called “Spirito Santo.” Her animals have a complex interior life.

Lisa has studied widely, transitioning from a “potter” to a sculptor and storyteller, and to a conduit for ideas that come to her from an unseen realm. She says, “At this point, clay and I are dear, old friends. My experience in the studio is a conversation; a collaboration with something unseen but felt and understood.”

ArtTalk resumes on January 17 with a fascinating conversation with David Leopold, creative director of the Al Hirschfeld Foundation and author of “The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age,” which was published to coincide with a major retrospective that Leopold curated for the New York Historical Society. The book won universal acclaim. The Washington Post called it an “instant classic,” and Amazon selected it for its “Top Books of 2015.”

Leopold became interested in the artwork of Hirschfeld when, more than 30 years ago, he was researching Ben Solowey’s series of charcoal drawings of Broadway performers, opera singers and dancers called “Theatre Portraits.” Leopold discovered that Solowey’s drawings frequently ran side by side with Al Hirschfeld’s legendary theatre work. He reached out to the artist for more information and soon became his archivist, visiting Hirschfeld at least once a week in his studio for 13 years.

Today he co-hosts the popular Hirschfeld Century Podcast, nominated as “Best New York City Podcast” by the 2020 Apple Awards.

Kirby Fredendall paints mood as generated by her experience of the landscape. Her paintings are a visual record of her experience in nature. They are not about how the landscape looks as much as about how the landscape can make one feel. 

Kirby is highly conscious of the section of landscape she chooses, pulling apart elements of the landscape and selectively reconfiguring them. The viewer is gently led away from a directly observed image to one where a balance is struck between the known and the felt. The surface is organized into separate areas where one can then experience the landscape as a vista across a body of water, as the transparency of light and objects seen beneath the water, and the combinations of light and color that play together among all of these views. The viewer can be drawn deep into the visual space or skate along the surface.

One observer said of Kirby’s work, ”It’s almost as if the artist was able to capture that elusive space between the physical landscape and the mental manifestations of being there; she packages up that tenuous space and serves it to us on canvas." Deborah Kostianovsky From InLiquid.

Kirby Fredendall is an award-winning artist who has exhibited widely in the region, including at Phillips’ Mill community Association. She earned a BA from Duke University. She attended Boston University’s British Art & Architecture Program in London (1987), and Duke University’s Renaissance Art & History Program in Florence (1986).

A person reaches for an apple in a tree. Underneath is a dog. A bird with it’s wings outstretched displays each feather. These can be challenging subjects for any artist who engages with detail. But for a weaver bound by the unrelenting grid of a woven cloth, they are daunting and greedy of time. Master weaver Armando Sosa is committed to surmounting these challenges. So much so that he himself built a complex loom that he researched from his native Guatemala as well as Europe and China.

Now he weaves traditional motifs in his own combinations and colors to express his dreams, his memories, and his aspirations.  The resulting works show the overlapping cultural influences that have inspired his art.

Artist Bio: Armando Sosa was born in rural Salcaja, in the Guatemalan Highlands. The son of a weaver, his job as a young boy he was guarding newly dyed threads drying on the grass of the riverbank from being trampled by cows!  At the age of eight he spun and dyed yarn. At fifteen, he wove shawls and garments on a simple 4-harness loom. At sixteen, he moved to Guatemala City where he first worked with a compound-harness loom. From 1970 until 1980, he exhibited his work in Latin America and the United States. In 1993 Armando moved to the Princeton area where he began to weave again, building a total of 4 large complex looms from memory. Various awards he has received include the title “Artist of Exceptional Ability” from the United States Government. In Jan. 2016, Sosa was named the first Folk Art Master of the State of New Jersey by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Pamela M. Miller is known for her landscapes with hay rolls, which she wants to capture before they disappear from the Bucks County scene forever. She says her work is dedicated to the simple pleasure of viewing a field, to the work of a farmer’s imprint on the land, and to the long-playing motion picture of the seasons. Her homage is composed in pastel of intense color and the changing light of day.

Pam is this year’s Honored Artist as well as Signature Image artist for the 94th Juried Art Show at Phillips’ Mill. She’s exhibited at Phillips’ Mill Community Association’s annual juried art show many times and received numerous awards. She was part of Phillips’ Mill’s 75th Retrospective Invitational show in 2005 and is included in the book of the exhibition. A local fixture, Pam has exhibited widely including at the Philadelphia Sketch club, Coryell Gallery, and others. She earned her teacher’s certification at Northland College in Wisconsin and taught in public schools for many years. She now gives private classes.

What if Edward Hopper was a Goth who read manga? Martha Wirkijowski paints nightscapes that Hopper might have painted if he’d had those references. She often depicts buildings at night, from the perspective of an observant outsider. There’s an expectancy to her paintings, an awareness. And like Hopper, Martha has a keen sense of color. But her color goes to eleven. It’s neon. Her website says she paints luminous nightscapes. That’s true, if mild. They glow with phosphorescent green, hot pink, burnt orange and magic hour blue. There’s color in her shadows, color in her whites.

Martha’s subjects are often street scenes, usually Lambertville, NJ. Lambertville’s famous Halloween extravaganza appears in Martha’s oeuvre frequently and fondly. Even when her subject isn’t that spooky holiday her nightscapes have a Gorey-esque quality, with weblike interlacing of tree branches and animated shadows. She has other subjects too, landscapes and cats.

We’ll talk with Martha about her thoroughly modern aesthetic, how she pulls off those neon colors in her nightscapes and about how much manga she does or doesn’t read.

Martha Wirkijowski graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustrations. She’s the creator of two graphic novels, Unlucky Sacred Heart Suburb Book One and Sacred Heart Suburb Book One, She’s exhibited broadly, including at Phillip’s Mill Juried Art Show, in Philadelphia Galleries, Brooklyn, and more.

View more at www.marthawirkijowski.com.

Baseball bats that branch or crook sideways… tables with legs and “bent knees” that seem to dance… candlesticks apparently made of mismatched wooden discs stacked precariously that risk the security of the flaming torches they’re meant to hold… these are some of the works created by sculptor Mark Sfirri. His wooden turnings have an insouciance that belies the precision that characterizes his work. His pieces are humorous and engaging.

Some of the best art can result from explorations of a very simple concept. Mark Sfirri has fruitfully explored multi-axis wood turning on a lathe. The technique is challenging and requires careful planning and yet Mark’s results appear effortless.

Mark Sfirri has a BFA and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. His work is in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, the Museum of Arts & Design in NY, Yale University Art Gallery, the LA County Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Musee de Bugey-Valromey, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and the Michener Art Museum, among many others. He’s written several articles on Wharton Esherick and lectured and demonstrated on wood turning internationally.

As a kid in California during the 80’s Leon Rainbow saw the impact other kids were having as they created a new art form through graffiti. The colors and the movement were cool. He decided that’s what he wanted to do. Now Leon is a resident of Trenton, where he not only is a graffiti artist but also teaches and sometimes juries art.

Leon says his art is a channel for deeper expression. He applies fine art composition and principles to his work which allows him to react and visually educate on social issues and current events. He uses styles that his young audience can relate to and designs his visual media with a powerful spiritual message. Leon believes that his approach allows him to reach a wide variety of people:

“Anyone who looks at my art sees something beautiful – it might just be color, shape or form – or they can tune into the narrative. My goal is to make art that resonates on several levels.”

Helena van Emmerik-Finn has focused on pastels as her main media for more than forty years, with oil as a second media. She paints light and color and let’s them reveal the landscape or scene in her works. Her emphasis on compositional movement engages the viewer in her subject. She says, “The preliminary drawing process has become very important to me. Once I have established this strong foundation in my work, I intuitively and quickly apply color."

We’ll talk with Helena about her process and why the technical aspects of her art are so important to creating the engaging images in her work. We’ll also explore pastels as a medium, what makes them uniquely challenging and rewarding.

Helena’s family emigrated from Holland a few weeks before she was born and settled in upper Bucks County. She attended the Philadelphia College of Art where she studied graphic design, photography and film-making. Helena is a regular participant in the Phillips’ Mill Juried Art Show. After college, Helena traveled extensively, including back-backing and youth-hostelling through Europe, North Africa and India. She now lives in Doylestown, Bucks County, with her husband, Bob.