STRICOF FINE ART GALLERY IN CHELSEA

Okay there are two posts today, 'cause I really want to talk about this gallery that I ran into right after the Cityscape show. I saw a piece in the window and thought I would give it a shot. Went in and was blown away. I found out later that they were only showing like half of the had in storage. They have all the images online at http://www.stricoff.com/. It's worth the visit. Here is a taste of what I liked. I think the images talk for themselves.


















I don't know what else to say. It was great and I'm definitely going back there specifically next time. I know it's hard to comprehend but all of this stuff looked way better in person. Great stuff. I'm just speechless I guess.

"Summer In the City" Group Exhibition + Lana Santorelli Gallery

Okay so after my short stop into Soho, I needed to find my way to Chelsea. Getting lost in Chelsea is a great thing by the way. Since all my directions were written down from google maps, I got turned around a bit every once in a while. While I was in Chelsea though, without fail, every time I got lost I found a cool gallery with at least something notable in it. Example below.
This I thought was a great piece. It was in a group show. Nice quaint little gallery that seemed to know what they were doing because they didn't let me take any photographs. However, giving them my e-mail address they were nice enough to send me this image that caught my eye while walking by. The business in the bottom center and the large voids of color else where really make my eye move through the piece in a pleasing way. Interesting color arrangement and was just nice to look at. Nothing else in the gallery had this much weight unfortunately.


"Summer In the City" Group Exhibition
Venue: George Billis Gallery
Schedule: From 2009-06-30 To 2009-08-15
Address: 511 W 25th St., New York, NY 10001
Phone: 212-645-2621 Fax: 212-645-2397

This was my next marked show I wanted to hit while I was in NYC. It was a group show in a little cozy space. I was a bit worried it wouldn't be open since its website didn't give gallery hours. It was open though, thankfully, and I was able to see some interesting cityscape paintings. These are the highlights from the show. Some of them were just exact depictions of New York City skylines, others seemed to push for something else with the paint.
This one had just a nice geometric feel that I thought people might enjoy. Great Gatsby kind of way.

Riding the bus into NYC I had plenty of opportunity to see the loads of graffiti that's in NYC. Entire rooftops would be covered with tags. Going across on the bridges looking down, there looked to be an entire different community that was just hanging on these rooftops tagging every last square inch of the buildings. Some might not like the sight of it, but me I thoroughly enjoyed each new set of graffiti.


The above painting by the way is a watercolor. Don't ask me how it blows my mind. It was a great piece with just that nice washy watercolor feel. The cityscape of New York City is unreal sometimes.

You can click on any of these images by the way and see them full view.

Malcolm T. Liepke

Malcolm T. Liepke "About....Face"
Venue: Arcadia Fine Arts
Schedule: From 2009-07-23 To 2009-08-06
Address: 51 Greene St., New York, NY 10013
Phone: 212-965-1387 Fax: 212-965-8638







So this was the first gallery that I ran into in NYC. It was in Soho, which is this crazy area on the fringe of Chinatown. One second I'm walking through Chinatown with street side vendors and Chinese lettering everywhere, and the next there is suddenly this ritzy architecture with columns around me. Little bit of a flip but I was able to find the place easily enough. They let me take photos in this gallery so I got some nice pics to show you.




They were good portraits. If you looked at them by themselves, and ignored the price tag attached to them, which if you ask me are a bit overpriced. though if they sold then that just shows you that it wasn't overpriced. Traditional modeling on the face with what looked like several layers of glazing to get that ghostly glass finish. Then the backgrounds were slapped on with an overused palette knife technique. This basically describes all of his work. They grab the eye certainly. There is a lot of nice contrast in them that I can appreciate, but seeing maybe 20 or so portraits in front of me with almost no progression. The guy wasn't solving any problems. He figured out what he was going to do then he did it 20 times. I went to this gallery 'cause I enjoy portraiture and the image below caught my eye online. Getting there seeing the paintings, they were nice but after about a minute of staring I was bored. There was paintings later on which got me more excited. I may of rushed through this gallery though, who knows. Maybe more time standing in front of these paintings would of brought a better appreciation for his stuff.

I guess you could say that these pieces are nice, but standing in the gallery with all of these portraits around me his technique became pretty transparent fairly quickly. The fact that the guy was 50 something and painting all these portraits of women might of been something that tweaked me also.
The gallery had some art books of the artist at the reception desk, which showed the artist having a portfolio that dated back to the early 70's. So at least that was something. Probably the reason why the paintings were going for so much money, or it might of been the area the gallery was in, who knows.

Once I found my way to the back of the gallery I saw some stuff that was a bit more interesting. Whenever I go through galleries, the back rooms always have some stuff that is more interesting than whats being shown in the main room. That might just be a case of not seeing the same idea being repeated several times in front of me.



So that's what I have for today. I'm going to see if I can do this as a daily update, until I'm out of galleries to talk about. We'll see how that goes.

Comments would be appreciated

New York City

This is going to be a collection of reviews from Galleries I visit. Most of them in New York City, but if I get motivated enough probably some in Boston. Each gallery is going to be posted separately so that comments can be focused on each gallery more specifically. I'm posting all this in the hopes people will be interested in the things I bring up and we can get some discussions going, or in the very least you enjoy the photos. Anyways, comments welcomed if not encouraged and I hope you enjoy this.