Janet Jennings & Lucy Cookson

American Painter b. 1953

Janet Jennings is known for her luminous oil and watercolor paintings. After working for Lawrence Rubin at Knoedler Contemporary Art, Jennings maintained a studio at Waverly Studios in New York City. She began as a Color Field painter, working on canvas and linen. After moving to Amagansett, NY in 1981, she switched her focus to landscape painting. Her career path led her to teaching at The Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall and The Victor D’amico Institute of Art. From 1993 to 1998, Jennings was the Chair of the Andy Warhol Visual Arts Preserve Program.

In 1997, she was a founding member of CMEE, The Children’s Museum of the East End. Working with Lee Skolnick and JoAnn Secor, she was an exhibit designer and fabricator for “Time and Place, Light and Space”, the initial installation at Guild Hall, which launched CMEE. She was a lead designer for the permanent exhibition installation of CMEE, located in Bridgehampton, NY.

Jennings maintains ties to the art community as an educator and curator. She is a member of the East Hampton Arts Council, an advocacy group for performing and visual artists of East Hampton. Ms. Jennings maintains a painting studio in East Hampton and currently teaches oil and watercolor classes.

Jennings received her BFA from the University of Dayton and attended The Dayton Art Institute, Antioch College and The Art Students League. Her paintings are in numerous corporate and private collections worldwide. She has exhibited at numerous galleries on Long Island and New York City, including Gallery North, Elaine Benson Gallery, Hampton Road Gallery, Glen Horowitz Gallery, Lizan-Tops Gallery, Mark Humphrey Gallery, Pamela Williams Gallery, The New York Design Center, and Chase Edwards Gallery.

American Painter

Lucy Cookson is the founder, president and creative director of Thimbelina Needlework Design and Collection in East Hampton, New York. A graduate of Duke University, she is an artist of watercolor, hand-embellished digital prints, mixed media and needlework, with several years of K-12 teaching experience. Lucy’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and in personal art collections throughout the United States.

As a trustee of Guild Hall, Lucy sits on the Artist-in-Residence committee. Guild Hall of East Hampton’s Artist-in-Residence program provides emerging artists with two months living space, a stipend, access to mentorship through Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts (an association of the country’s most accomplished creative individuals), and introductions to the cultural community of the Hamptons. Integral to the program is the opportunity for collaboration, conversations, and partnerships with regional artists, as well as with the East End’s many cultural institutions.  www.guildhall.org

Lucy also serves on the Board of Visitors at the Savannah College of Art and Design. The SCAD Board of Visitors is a voluntary board comprised of leaders in business, government, education, art, and design. The board provides a global network of advocacy and support for SCAD, with a special focus on facilitating the university's growth and development. www.scad.edu

Exhibition of New Works by Hamilton Aguiar

Opening July 13th, 5-9 pm

Brazilian Painter b. 1965

The pictorial work of Hamilton Aguiar (Brazil, 1965) had its initial inspiration in the world of mural and interior design. That world where paintings, the spatial fit of objects and the handling of lights are essential to activate our senses and sensibility. A world, in which the private interiority and the home kingdom are harmonized to keep the tensions and shocks of the outside life at bay. It was in this context of applied arts where he developed a refined management of different techniques and materials of the pictorial craft. An experience that had its field of action in New York at the end of the 80s, the city where he settled residence in 1987.

In 2004 Aguiar made the leap to the contemporary art scene with a painting whose fundamental characteristic, from the poetic point of view, is the use of neo-figurative language. A sensualistic neo- figuration of retinal inspiration deployed in flat colors, that exploits the scales and chromatic gradations of intense colors. Paintings where the background-figure-relation is gradually interwoven until merging into atmospheres and environments that transmit a great stillness. The look feels attracted by the explosion of light and color.

The landscape look in Hamilton Aguiar's painting got accentuated since he settled in Miami in 2013. The nature and climate of southern Florida and its ecosystems appear emphatically in his paintings. For example, the lavish seascapes and elements of the Caribbean flora that surround Miami make their way into the works of his most recent exhibition "On the Horizon" (Blank Space Art Gallery, NYC, 2017) and "Hamilton Aguiar. Land and sea" (Newbury Fine Arts, Boston, 2018). In this neo-figurative poetics stand out the details around the treatment of light. The transparencies of the colors in the sand, the sky and the sea take on a volume, a moody corporality of human warmth. We are speaking of a combination of pictorial practice and craft subject to a careful technical control, both in the application phase of the painting and in the drying phase of the works. Pieces made of oil and resin in copper sheets on wooden panel, seeking to activate the sensuality of the viewer to submerge in the depth of these environments, leading us to a state of hypnotic contemplation. The work of Hamilton Aguiar is represented by important galleries and exhibition spaces of contemporary art from Latin America and the United States. His work has been widely exhibited in the circuits of international fairs and is part of important collections of contemporary art, both public and private.

on view This summer season

 Bjorn Skarrup

Indoor-Outdoor Large sculptures

Sculptor

Danish, b. 1973

Bjorn Skaarup holds a MA in History and Art History from the University of Copenhagen, and a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.  Skaarup has also furthered his education with post-doctoral studies at the Warburg Institute, London, and Columbia University, New York.

In addition to his career as a self-taught sculptor, Skaarup has written and illustrated numerous books on historical, archaeological, and anatomical subjects. 

Skaarup’s unique sculptures draw inspiration from classical mythology, late Renaissance, as well as 20th century American pop culture, while reinterpreting both classical and modern artistic themes.

"My animal sculptures represent a number of characters that have been given man-made and cultural tools and attributes that underline their particular traits – the dignity and supremacy of the majestic lion, the chivalrous nature of the ermine, the speed of the cheetah, the height of the giraffe, and the heavenly aspirations of the ostrich... The sculptures are a celebration of life and nature and its many intriguing shapes and creatures, all placed in peculiar and surreal encounters between nature and culture. The result is a group of bronze sculptures that combines the gracious and exclusive with the communicative, distorted and humorous."