BrassWorks Gallery
105 Grove Street, Montclair
Closes: Aug. 28
7 a.m.- 7 p.m. weekdays
Reception: Aug. 7, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Studio Montclair’s Leach Gallery
641 Bloomfield Ave, Montclair
Aug. 7-21
1 p.m.- 5 p.m. Thurs-Sun
Reception: Aug. 7 6 p.m. – 8 p.m.
This month, two exhibitions celebrate the art and generosity of Catherine Kinkade, who died this past October at age 85.
From Aug. 7 to Aug. 21, BrassWorks Gallery’s 17 large-scale landscapes are joined by a two-week sister exhibition and sale at Studio Montclair’s Leach Gallery of smaller oils, pastels, monotypes and works on paper. Proceeds benefit Studio Montclair.
“It will be a moveable feast,” said Cheryl Minden, the esteemed art director and curator at BrassWorks, who designed the show there.
Studio Montclair was established in 1997 by five Montclair artists including longtime past president Virginia Schaffer Block. The nationally respected, nonprofit arts organization now boasts roughly 500 members nationwide.
Kinkade was an early member of Studio Montclair and long served on the executive board. “Catherine wrote our by-laws,” said President Phoebe Pollinger. “She understood the importance of a strong institutional foundation.”
Now, Catherine and her widower and supporter Merwin Kinkade are expanding Studio Montclair institutional security through their gift of the pieces for sale.
“Catherine’s works are in corporate and private collections nation and worldwide. We have priced her works to be affordable. We want people to own and love her incredible art work,” Pollinger said, echoing similar sentiments from Brasswork’s Minden. Kinkade’s art is owned by Tiffany, AT&T, Exxon and BASF.
A philosophy major, Kinkade enjoyed corporate success before turning to art. “When I started to do artwork, I was old enough so I didn’t sit at anybody’s feet,” Kinkade said in a past interview recorded by fellow artist and colleague Janet Boltax.
A master of the Pastel Society of America, Kinkade taught sought-after classes for 46 years at the Montclair Art Museum, especially in her beloved plein-air painting.
She was artist-in-residence both at Riker’s Hill Art Park in Livingston and for many recent years at Montclair’s Van Vleck Gardens, an executive board member of Studio Montclair and the founder and printmaker of Viridian Print Studio at Riker’s.
Kinkade created oils, pastels, and monotypes of transcendent beauty and wonder. She was a landscape painter of the essential. She long ago mastered realism so that she could martial or dispense with it at will. Her deep sense of a given place determined the degree of abstraction or realism she chose to capture.
“It’s a choice of how realistic or abstract I want to have a painting,” Kinkade said in her interview with Boltax.
At the BrassWorks show, Kinkade’s pitch-perfect palette shifts with seasons and places, from the warm yellows and ochres of Church Hayfield I and II to the intense–even ominous–deep scarlets and black of Red I and II. In the Hayfields, we feel the warmth, see the golden light of the French countryside. In the two Reds, dense weaves of leaves and branches become powerful abstracts of gut-punching impact.
In Kinkade’s And The Water Was Silver, Lotus 4, scale and an overhead point of view reveal the details of lily pads and flowers. Blink your eyes and the oversize elements create a pattern of blues, white, and green against silver water.
Kinkade often painted scenes close to home, here notably in the five monotypes of Bloomfield’s Clark Pond in Winter. She captures the feel of winter, the quiet. Sometimes the water is still. Sometimes it flows. The composition and perspective in the Clark Pond series are largely traditional to Western art.
In contrast is the rhythmic, more Chinese Taoist composition of Clos Wall III. A slender tree bends towards a gold stone wall. The tree’s sinuous curve is echoed by a vivid blue shadow that seems to transmogrify into a brooklet piercing the wall. A canopy of green leaves hovers above. The harmony of the work’s dominant colors, offset by the lavenders of ancient stones mesmerizes.
Kinkade discussed her love of plein-air painting.
“It is a personal expression, that it is probably the most difficult thing,” Kinkade said. “It is absolutely the most glorious, as far as I’m concerned.”
Kinkade’s works are glorious. Spend time and they will transform how you see the world.
