Longyear Gallery Upcoming News and Events

by Lynn Woods

“Travel As Muse,” a group show of paintings and drawings currently on view at High Falls’ Wired Gallery, grew out of the art  tours gallery owner Sevan Melikyan has been conducting since 2018. On the last trip he organized to Istanbul three participants who happened to be artists shared their sketches with the group over dinner, which triggered an idea: “They need to show this work to the public,” he recalls thinking. The result is “Travel As Muse,” an exhibition of drawings, watercolors and acrylic and oil paintings by eight local artists who were inspired by the tours. Besides Istanbul, the destinations they sketched and painted are Paris, Venice, Sicily and Malta.

One of the participating artists is Longyear member Marcia Clark, who contributed six paintings, including of Hagia Sophia, the harbor, and the mountainous landscape of Cappadocia (painted in sections of canvas mounted on a freestanding structure of foamcore). “The work all evolved from ink drawings done in a tiny sketchbook,” she says. “I took scads of photos, and the paintings were a balancing act between the facts and my initial strong impression recorded in the drawings.”

Travel to far-flung places has long been integral to her practice as a painter. In 2022, she traveled to the Mediterranean and the Arctic, places she has visited multiple times. In Turkey, Greece and Italy, she painted architectural sites as well as landscapes, while in the Arctic the obvious point of interest were the glaciers and the immense expanse of uninterrupted space. Painting ice also had its appeal:  “I was interested in observing the structure of the ice and its quality of light, as well as the simplicity of a color scheme based on blue. I was also attracted to the bright dots of color in the landscape made by communities of little houses mainly belonging to the Inuit population.”

A residency in Upernavik in 2007 was her introduction to the region. “I flew to Greenland with a group of scientists who were on their way back to the ice sheet that covers 80% of the country, and their excitement was contagious,” she recalls. “After the residency in Upernavik, I flew to Ilulissat, where there is an ice fiord that you can just about walk to. I’ve returned to Ilulissat many times and have done paintings on site weather permitting. I usually stayed at the Kunstmuseum”—on her first visit she met the director, who offered her a residency the next year—“and had a show there in 2013.”

Since there are no direct flights to Greenland, Marcia usually gets there via Iceland, where she’s had residencies in Reykjavik and in the north in a village that was once the country’s herring capital. “Though I’ve managed to find residencies at many places I’ve been interested in, if I’ve discovered a place where I want to set up I will look for accommodations regardless if there’s a possible residency nearby.”

Her first close encounter with the elemental sublime was In 1971, when she was an artist in residence at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s hut at Lake of the Clouds in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. She had to hike in with her supplies. “I do gravitate to unencumbered views,” she says. “Above the timberline I could see peak after peak, on a clear day all the way to Portland. There was arctic vegetation, and the weather was extreme. I loved it up there!”

After meeting an observer of the weather station at the summit of Mount Washington, she was invited to help with the planning of a museum about the mountain. She painted the backgrounds for dioramas of the mountain’s historic sites and painted a glacier for the geology exhibition, using an illustrated book about Glacier Bay, in Alaska, as a reference as well as sketches made by Frederic Church, which were in the archives of the Cooper Hewitt Museum.  

Marcia had previously developed an appreciation of Thomas Cole after moving part time to New Paltz in the late 1960s and discovering the same landscape he had painted 150 years before. “I saw how beautifully and poetically he studied nature in his sketches and how important it was to the outcome,” she says. “It made me ask myself, are you looking? Well, look deeper!” She retraced the 19^th-century artist’s travels in the Catskills and White Mountains and wrote about it in an article published in Smithsonian Magazine.

There are also paintings of the local woods and scenes from Riverside Park, some of which have the vertigo-inducing viewpoint of her landscapes; an early painting, from the 1980s, depicts a vertical slice of lower Manhattan viewed from the 104^th floor of the World Trade Center.

After earning a BFA from Yale, her work “was done almost entirely on site and was mostly small in scale,” she recalls. “It was always based on observation, or should I say, perception, because what you see has to be interpreted. There is the view, but you also have a point of view.” She also holds an MFA from SUNY New Paltz and is a longtime member and director of Blue Mountain Gallery.  “Travel as Muse” runs through June 21 and provides an excellent opportunity to view Marcia’s interpretations of Turkey.

https://www.thewiredgallery.com