CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE ART STUDIO PRACTICES REBORN ON LONG ISLAND
 
  The Long Island Academy of Fine Art’s Full Time Professional Program
Brings New Work to Hersh Fine Art
 

Members of Atelier Armetta, the full-time classical drawing and painting program at the Long Island Academy of Fine Art, will have their work on display at Hersh Fine Art, in downtown Glen Cove, from September 6th through October 31st. All are welcome to the opening reception for the exhibition, which takes place on Saturday, September 8th, from
6 to 8 p.m.

The group of drawings on display represents the first two years of study in the program, during which the students have followed the Italian Renaissance-inspired nineteenth-century French method of learning to draw, creating figure drawings from life, drawings of classical antique sculptures, copies of Old Master drawings, and copies of plates from a book of studies and exercises by Charles Bargue, a nineteenth-century painter whose created a course for drawing students, the Cours de Dessin. “Atelier,” meaning artist’s studio or workshop, describes not only the program but also the time-honored practice of learning to draw through the painstaking and long-drawn-out method of copying and refining to a high degree of finish, rather than simply sketching.

The exhibition, titled A Fine Line: Drawings from Atelier Armetta, includes work by fifteen different artists, yet has a quiet sense of coherence. The drawings, done in pencil, charcoal, and various colored chalks, have a subtle range of colors well suited to the classical elegance of their subjects. Atelier Director Robert Armetta explains, “These drawings represent long hours of arduous study by students who are building a firm foundation on which to establish their careers as classical artists.” What visitors to the gallery will see in the work is not the difficulties the students encountered or the long hours they put in, but their beautiful results.
 

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        For more information about Atelier Armetta or Hersh Fine Art, please
        call 646.508.7645, write info@hershfineart.com, or visit www.hershfineart.com.
  Interior, Exterior:
Paintings by Catherine Prescott
   
 


Catherine Prescott, an award-winning painter from Pennsylvania whose work has been honored by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Portrait Society of America, and the National Arts Club in New York, among others, will exhibit 34 of her paintings at Hersh Fine Art, in Glen Cove, from June 8th through July 29th. The opening reception for the artist, to which all are welcome, is on Friday, June 15th, from 6 to 8 p.m.

In addition to the exhibition, Prescott, who has taught painting and drawing in private and professional settings over the course of her career, will teach a portrait workshop on June 22nd, 23rd, and 24th at the Long Island Academy of Fine Art, next door to the gallery.

Prescott has a strong and diverse body of work that includes beautifully soft and spare landscapes and still-lifes, but she is best known for her arresting portraits, and is much sought-after for her commissioned portraits. She is drawn to working with people who have intense personalities or unusual stories, and her paintings tend to use subtly placed objects in an interior, or a surrounding landscape that influences the painting’s mood, to suggest the personal narratives of her subjects without overtly stating what they are about. This play between her subjects’ state of mind and their surroundings is the source of the exhibition’s title, “Interior, Exterior: Paintings by Catherine Prescott.”

Hersh Fine Art gallery director Flora Armetta notes that many of Prescott’s paintings, though contemporary in feel, show the influence of seventeenth-century Spanish painters such as Zurbarán. “With their dramatic darks and lights, Catherine’s paintings really carry across a room,” Armetta said. “On the day we hung the show, every person who looked in the gallery window in passing came in to take a closer look. We are delighted to have Catherine here—I have followed her work for some time, and it is very exciting to see the way she continues to change and grow as a painter.”

 

 
  Fiction / Non-Fiction  
  Hersh Fine Art is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, “Fiction / Non-Fiction,” featuring alumni from the New York Academy of Art. The show will run from April 16th to June 3rd, with a reception open to the public on Friday, April 20th, from 6 to 8 p.m.  
 
 
 
 
  Artists exhibiting are Emily Davis Adams, Dina Brodsky, Maya Brodsky, Aleah Chapin, Samuel Evensen, Steve Forster, and Michael Meadors.
 
  
  As the painter Steve Forster explains, “the act of seeing an object and trying to describe it in paint seems simple enough. But trying to translate its light, proportion of form, tone, its color and shape, and surrounding atmosphere onto canvas may be more complicated. Add to this a personal aesthetic and philosophical quest, which naturally develop over time for each painter, and the end result is a group of paintings that bridge two realities—the perceptual and the conceptual.”


The effort to depict the reality of the visible world, and the desire to unveil something meaningful beyond that, raises the question of what is “real.” Fiction / Non-Fiction brings together a group of artists who have an intimate connection with realist representation, but who each use their own visual language to create work that transcends observation.