DAVID GIBSON WRITING

The purpose of imagination is to see. Amanda Church understands that it takes very little to allow us to depart from the real into the imagined, and she provides these elements in her paintings as an entry into the mystery that separates the sensory from what is useful in everyday life. The type of experience they engender can be found easily in nature, like looking for the constellations in the night sky, or divining meaning from tea leaves. Three elements are actively at work in these images: lines, color, and perspective, and each complicates the other two. Looking at “Flash Point” (2006) for instance, we may at first see only areas of color and forms that suggest hands, feet, and the profile of a human face. The shapes inferring human form are not depicted straightforwardly, but as if a picture was taken from so close to its subject that all the details became blurred. Also, Church cuts across the “objective” of the painting with a scrim of other lines that disjoint i

As a painter, Thomas Frontini is a very good spinner of tales. He sees magic in the mundane, and explores the themes of creativity, youthful experience, and the transformative power of the imagination. His characters contain a degree of emotional depth comparable to those in narratives. They arise out of myth and memory, and often enter from his intimate emotional life, and aid him in dramatizing various parables on creativity, family, and the search for identity. They project a quality of innocence that is part fancifulness and part fantasy, affirming Frontini’s earnest appreciation for the rigor of dreams. The structure of fantasy has its base in allegory--the construction of an ethos through divergent modes of expression. A fantasy is more than a single fabrication, but a complication of means in collusion towards the end of setting up an exception to the mundane upon the model of an ethical exception. By creating an atypical progression of the real, the enabler of fantasies is crea

  Lately, most of my studio visits are being made in preparation for upcoming group exhibitions, and there are few exceptions. Yet one recent visit was done out of the blue, and it proved quite a surprise. The artist is Jenny Carpenter , originally from Omaha, Nebraska, but who has traveled and lived in various locations around the U.S., and also Australia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and South Africa. These trips are made possible by her work as a freelance art director at various advertising agencies in cities where she has lived. As a New Yorker myself, and thoroughly ensconced in the New York art world, I was very surprised to hear how much the artist traveled. She was able to also take long periods of seclusion in her painting between bouts of travel and work, and New York remained for her a place to dream, not merely one to struggle.   I walked up the six flights of steps in a typical West Village red brick apartment building to be met by her at the threshold of her f