The Box Gallery Spotlight: Curator Bruce Helander taps J.Steven Manolis to show work at ART FLORIDA 2017 at The Box Gallery
SPOTLIGHT: Bruce Helander
J.Steven Manolis to show at ART FLORIDA 2017
ART FLORIDA 2017
The Curators Choices
Jan.7-28, 2017
"In the Heart of the West Palm Beach Cultural Corridor"
811 Belvedere Road
811 Belvedere Road
West Palm Beach, Florida 33405
West Palm Beach- The Box Gallery is proud to announce that Bruce Helander will be presenting the work of J.Steven Manolis as his choice for the Art Florida 2017 Curators Choices Exhibition. The Box Gallery will be host to a VIP reception for the curators and their selected artists on
Friday, January 20, 2017 at 7 p.m. RSVP
ART FLORIDA 2017 CURATORS CHOICES was organized by Rolando Chang-Barrero to emphasises the importance and impact that Bruce Helander, Paul Fisher, Jane Hart, Lee Ann Lester, Marisa J.Pascucci, Noor Blazekovic and Debby Coles-Dobay have on the maturation and the vitality of the art and culture scene of South Florida.
West Palm Beach-Rolando Chang Barrero has gathered top curators to select the art for the upcoming The Box Gallery's Art Florida 2017 Exhibition.
The ART FLORIDA 2017 Exhibition includes selections by curators:
Bruce Helander, Paul Fisher, Jane Hart, Lee Ann Lester, Marisa Pascucci,
Noor Blazekovic, Debbie Coles-Dobay and Rolando Chang Barrero.
ART FLORIDA 2017 was organized by Rolando Chang-Barrero, to emphasises the importance and impact that Helander, Fisher, Hart, Lester, Pascucci, Blazekovic and Coles-Doby have on the maturation and the vitality of the art and culture scene of South Florida.
From creating international art fairs and publishing critical reviews for the academic art world, to organizing museum exhibitions and sponsoring dialectical symposiums --the collective experience of the selected curators present the work of J.Steven Manolis, Andy Marx, Dana Donaty, Sarah Knouse,
Karla Walter, Carin Wagner,
Jon Glaser, Stefan Radu Cretu, and Patrick Willard
Bruce Helander is an artist and curator who writes on art. He has a Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where he later became the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. He is a former White House Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and is a member of the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, an honor he shares with Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and John Chamberlain, among other distinguished artists, as well as writers Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams. Helander is the recipient of several grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and received the Palm Beach Cultural Consortium award for professional achievement.
Helander’s work is represented in more than fifty museum permanent collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Smithsonian. In Florida, he has had solo exhibitions at the Norton Museum of Art, Boca Raton Museum of Art, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs Museum of Art.
As a curator, Helander has organized over 100 gallery and museum exhibitions, including in locations from Manhattan to Dubai. As an art critic, he has contributed regular reviews for The Huffington Post for many years, and has written for Sculpture magazine, Simply the Best, Art Hive magazine and ForbesLife, and has a monthly column at One Art Nation called “As I See It.” He is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Art Economist, and currently is on the board of the Center for Creative Education.
J. Steven Manolis (Artist Statement)
ARTIST STATEMENT
From the earliest moment I can recollect I have experienced an unusually strong visual pull toward beauty, proportion, style, and color.
The greatest gift of all in this process has been the development of a close lifetime friendship with Wolf Kahn, artist extraordinaire and master colorist. This friendship has grown over the last thirty-five years. Strategic to my becoming an artist has been twenty-five years of one-on-one private lessons with him, which included open-air pastel studies.
He taught me the dynamics and beauty of color and, most importantly, how color combinations and expression literally speak their own narrative language, which when successful take the form of “evoking human emotion.”
Fits and starts and ten years into the educational process of studying with Wolf Kahn, I found my own artistic voice and style. My goal is that every single painting I complete meets my definition of beauty and standards, as well as evoking emotions in me. Simply put, all my paintings are multisensory experiences.
My painting sensibilities fall within four theoretical categories: 1) more-is-more 2) less-is-more 3) more-is-less or finally 4) less-is-less. Of course what I love is the end achievement of either “more-is-more” (which is most of my paintings) or “less-is-more” (on rare occasions). I do not complete or begin again paintings that fall into the last two undesired categories.
Throughout my painting process I am always reminded and aware of two artistic guidelines (and quotes) from my mentor Wolf Kahn:
• “ Keep painting on that surface until you feel that even one more drop of paint applied anywhere would ruin the painting,” and
• “In painting, as in life, one should always go further than one should go.”
I found my artistic expression through the medium of watercolor in the early 1990s, especially with large-scale highly vitreous multilayer abstract images. Everything I have done since, including my progression to other mediums and surfaces, stems from my initial large-scale watercolor experiences. My artistic desires have been profoundly impacted by the translucency of watercolors combined with the opaqueness of gouache. The fusion of layer upon layer results in a perception of depth and, of course, my version of beauty.
My paintings are always an expression of the conflict between simplicity and complexity. I start every painting with a natural unstructured plan. Then I keep adding on, going further with each image. More often than not this process quickly leads to either a visual conflict/problem, or worse yet, having already gone too far. When this occurs the visual conflict needs to be resolved. Crucial to my approach is the process of solving the visual conflict. I contemplate it in my mind with a game plan, and then undertake the actual solution.
Sometimes conflict resolution is not a one-step process. If successful, “visual magic” occurs. For me this pinnacle moment brings me an enormous thrill and tremendous gratification. Past success always breeds hope eternal for each new visual conflict.
Before starting a new work I always have the feelings of high expectation that precede any journey; for the painting process is a journey without a predetermined destination. You have an idea where you want to go but not what the details or surprises might be. As each work progresses I become elated as I discover the rewarding path of the journey! With this also come feelings of possession and responsibility for the work’s continuation, completion, and success.
In the last ten years I have begun to categorize my works in terms of subgroups of images. I did this for two reasons: firstly for the organization of a website and the rational display of my abstract images; secondly for the purpose of visualizing a beginning and an end, and thus refining and creating new images and subgroups relating to my earlier work.
My objective is to make striking diversified color images that are not only beautiful, but also evoke excitement in my collectors. When this occurs, I am thrilled and fulfilled. And I just want to do it again and again. Nothing makes me happier artistically than receiving calls from collectors telling me how much they enjoy living with my paintings.
More Spotlights and Sneak Peeks into Art Florida 2017 coming soon!
The Artists:
J. Steven Manolis, Patrick Willard, Andy Marx, Dana Donaty, Karla Walter,
Carin Wagner, Sarah Knouse, Stefan Radu Cretu, and Jon Glaser
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