Reception Saturday for Two Painters With New Exhibit at George Billis Gallery

George Billis Gallery in Westport will be exhibiting paintings by artists Adam Noel and Karen Recor, starting Saturday, Feb. 12, with an opening reception from 4 to 6:30 p.m.

The George Billis Gallery is located at 166 Main St. in downtown Westport.

— an announcement from the George Billis Gallery, with added information from the gallery website

ADAM NOEL

 

From Adam Noel’s page on the George Billis Gallery website:

Adam Collier Noel is an American photographer and collage artist who currently resides in South Florida. He graduated in 2002 with a BFA in photography from Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University.

Throughout his education Adam Collier Noel worked to combine diverse materials and techniques with various photographic processes. The subject matter incorporated into the artwork is often appropriated from his extensive collection of one-of-a-kind antique daguerreotypes and mid-century snapshots. Each photograph in his acquisition is chosen because of its ability to simultaneously mirror intimate and universal facets of the human experience.

“In a day and age when we are constantly being bombarded with immeasurable amounts of new imagery, I have chosen to create new art forms using vintage photographs that have been forgotten, lost or disregarded.

“This ambiguous, yet familiar collection of snapshots I have assembled traverses universal cultural themes such as nature, science, history and the physical form. My photography-based mixed media artwork relies heavily on the appropriation of these found images and their relationship to the contemporary world through the lens of popular culture.”

Over the last few years, Adam Collier Noel has traded representational imagery for bold abstraction in a new series of colorful paintings. Using his familiar grid composition, Noel explores formal compositional elements and color theory applications to achieve a rhythmic balance pleasing to the eye.

He explains, “The grid has always been a consistent element throughout my artwork. It is a way of bringing order to chaos and organization to disarray. Each color within the framework is carefully chosen and layered to create slight tension with overall harmony.”

​Adam Collier Noel has exhibited his work widely across the USA including South Florida, California, Midwest, and East Coast. He has shown his work at several art fairs including Scope Art Miami, Art Palm Beach and Palm Springs Fine Art Fair. His work features in numerous private collections in the US, Europe, South America and Australia.

KAREN RECOR

Karen has always been interested through readings and travel in ancient cultures and their customs, dance, music, poetry, and visual arts and other forms of creative expression.

Her travels took her to American Indian sites in many areas of the United States, the Mayan ruins in Central America, Cambodia, Greece, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, France, Italy, Turkey, the British Isles, the Caribbean, and Canada.

Using these travels as an impetus for further exploration as she became more fascinated with each culture that she studied, the influences and mark making techniques of the cultures were absorbed into her psyche and in her artwork. She decided to focus on these ideas and finished an MFA degree in painting at Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford.

In this program, she studied with New York artist Susan Wilmarth Rabineau, wife of the deceased minimalist sculptor, Christopher Wilmarth.

Through this study of European and Asian cultures Karen became more intrigued by the layering of each segment of history, the evocative calligraphic line, the various mixed media materials and the effect that light played in an artwork.

Here she reduced her images to a more simplified format and became excited by working with just the formal elements in an artwork rather than replicating what exists in nature.

Transcending the natural and exploring a window into an internal world these explorations led her to experiment further with creating ideas through her use of unconventional materials such as cold wax, natural objects, scraps of cloth, objects, and impasto oil paint.

In addition she continues to evolve while creating various techniques of applying the paint to its surface. Her explorations have a far eastern influence, which informs her artwork and is a result of her interest and study of yoga and Buddhism and travels to Japan, China and Thailand.

The primitive marks, color, texture, innate light, stained asymmetrical compositions and line direct one to focus on these clues leading to a spiritual place.
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Karen’s artwork has been shown both nationally (in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts) and internationally and is part of many private and corporate collections.