The City Island Nautical Museum has tapped Bronx-based visual artist Liz Alderman to launch their new initiative to showcase contemporary art within their historic landmarked building at 190 Fordham Street in Bronx, New York.
Alderman’s exhibit FLOCKED opens to the public on Sunday, June 11 from 1-4pm.
Birds are the visual subject matter of choice for artist Liz Alderman. Their shapes, colors and expressivity are the perfect fodder for the artist to exult in the materiality of paint.
FLOCKED features heavy-impasto paintings of eagles, finches, swallows and an albatross to which the artist has assigned names like Cokie, Ragnar, Nadine and Phoebe. The artist creates an imaginative persona for each bird that develops over the course of each paintings’ creation. A bird may first appear in the painting process with a countenance of stoicism or despair only to flip into the quintessence of joy or even mania, as embodied through Alderman’s unpredictable and multifaceted painting techniques. Alderman’s gestural brushwork can be sensuous and refined, or cartoonish and even violent.
The conflicting moods that Alderman’s birds emote are paralleled by conflicts of painterly style within each work. Each canvas is a frenetic arena of diverse painting techniques; paint is poured, then directed towards figuration with a brush, then smeared back into abstraction with a palette knife, then dissolved into drips that are further transformed into contour lines that describe feathers, beaks, waves or wings. Several of the bird paintings in FLOCKED contain entire tubes of paint, squeezed directly onto the canvas to delineate a horizon line, a talon, ship masts, sails or tree trunks.
The title of the show, FLOCKED, is a nod to the world of birds of course but it is also a reference to the process of “flocking” fabric, a centuries-old technique of creating patterned surface textures on fabrics with adhesives. Alderman’s canvases are similarly flocked.
Prior to starting a painting Alderman glues items to the canvas arbitrarily without forethought or knowledge of what the final figure portrayed will be. Alderman’s canvases are “flocked” with elements like synthetic fur, shredded paper, crinolines, ripped stockings, lace and broken jewelry. Alderman’s aim is to make the painting process unpredictable by covering her work surface with roadblocks that her brush must work around, into, onto or over.
“Painting is like pin-ball,” says the artist, “I create a mezzo-rilievo surface using my trash, basically, then propel myself into the painting process and hope to keep to the ball in play, embracing accidents and inviting in the unknown. Eventually a bird emerges.”
To enhance the unpredictability of her painting process the artist mixes the slough of her own existence into her paint; riffraff such as the content of her vacuum cleaner, dryer lint or hair pulled from her hairbrush are all added to her paints to create a viscous stew that can be difficult to manipulate with grace or subtlety.
As a result of her technique, her paintings resemble ecstatically apocalyptic alien landscapes full of pools, ridges, ravines and rivulets that are especially apparent when observed from a raking angle.
The detritus flocked onto the surface and the inscrutable effluvium within her paint come together to coagulate into grotesque bas-reliefs than span figuration and abstraction.
Clearly influenced by Van Gogh, Soutine and Auerbach as well as contemporary Allison Schulnik, Alderman has doubled-down on the physical properties of paint in the age of AI in order to create a tactile circus of marks that is flirtatious, bizarre, theatrical and best experienced in person.
Alderman’s exhibit FLOCKED opens to the public on Sunday, June 11 from 1-4pm.
Birds are the visual subject matter of choice for artist Liz Alderman. Their shapes, colors and expressivity are the perfect fodder for the artist to exult in the materiality of paint.
FLOCKED features heavy-impasto paintings of eagles, finches, swallows and an albatross to which the artist has assigned names like Cokie, Ragnar, Nadine and Phoebe. The artist creates an imaginative persona for each bird that develops over the course of each paintings’ creation. A bird may first appear in the painting process with a countenance of stoicism or despair only to flip into the quintessence of joy or even mania, as embodied through Alderman’s unpredictable and multifaceted painting techniques. Alderman’s gestural brushwork can be sensuous and refined, or cartoonish and even violent.
The conflicting moods that Alderman’s birds emote are paralleled by conflicts of painterly style within each work. Each canvas is a frenetic arena of diverse painting techniques; paint is poured, then directed towards figuration with a brush, then smeared back into abstraction with a palette knife, then dissolved into drips that are further transformed into contour lines that describe feathers, beaks, waves or wings. Several of the bird paintings in FLOCKED contain entire tubes of paint, squeezed directly onto the canvas to delineate a horizon line, a talon, ship masts, sails or tree trunks.
The title of the show, FLOCKED, is a nod to the world of birds of course but it is also a reference to the process of “flocking” fabric, a centuries-old technique of creating patterned surface textures on fabrics with adhesives. Alderman’s canvases are similarly flocked.
Prior to starting a painting Alderman glues items to the canvas arbitrarily without forethought or knowledge of what the final figure portrayed will be. Alderman’s canvases are “flocked” with elements like synthetic fur, shredded paper, crinolines, ripped stockings, lace and broken jewelry. Alderman’s aim is to make the painting process unpredictable by covering her work surface with roadblocks that her brush must work around, into, onto or over.
“Painting is like pin-ball,” says the artist, “I create a mezzo-rilievo surface using my trash, basically, then propel myself into the painting process and hope to keep to the ball in play, embracing accidents and inviting in the unknown. Eventually a bird emerges.”
To enhance the unpredictability of her painting process the artist mixes the slough of her own existence into her paint; riffraff such as the content of her vacuum cleaner, dryer lint or hair pulled from her hairbrush are all added to her paints to create a viscous stew that can be difficult to manipulate with grace or subtlety.
As a result of her technique, her paintings resemble ecstatically apocalyptic alien landscapes full of pools, ridges, ravines and rivulets that are especially apparent when observed from a raking angle.
The detritus flocked onto the surface and the inscrutable effluvium within her paint come together to coagulate into grotesque bas-reliefs than span figuration and abstraction.
Clearly influenced by Van Gogh, Soutine and Auerbach as well as contemporary Allison Schulnik, Alderman has doubled-down on the physical properties of paint in the age of AI in order to create a tactile circus of marks that is flirtatious, bizarre, theatrical and best experienced in person.
