Art Now Featured Artists in New Show at Tusinski Gallery
The five artists featured in the September 17th Art Now Rockport event are coming together again, this time at the Tusinski Gallery in Rockport. The show, called White Out, features artists Karen Tusinski, Renata Fryshara, Kurt Ankeny, Ben MacAdam and Nina Samoiloff opens on December 3rd. Don’t miss it!
Art Now: Rockport in Photos
Here are a few photos from Art Now: Rockport on September 17th. For a more detailed summary of what took place at this event click this link.
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Many thanks to all who attended, participated and supported Art Now Rockport. The artists: Renata Fryshara, Karen Tusinski, Nina Samoiloff, Kurt Ankeny, and Ben Macadam. The presenter: Art Advisor Lydia Barry Kutko. The hosts: Abigail Cahill O’Brien & Gregory O’Brien. The sponsors: Peter & Thi Linh Wernau of Wernau Asset Management. The food: Brett Roeske of Lula’s Pantry. The volunteer “staff”: Karen King, Sandi Hickey, Paul Kelly, Abby & Greg. And of course, those of you who attended – thanks so much for your support of contemporary art in Rockport!
Ben Macadam Interview
Again, an interview courtesy of Joey of Good Morning Gloucester with Art Now Rockport featured artist Ben Macadam.
Kurt Ankeny Interview
Another interview courtesy of Joey from the power blog Good Morning Gloucester, with one of Art Now Rockport’s featured artists: Kurt Ankeny:
Lydia Kutko Interview
Joey of Good Morning Gloucester, the region’s go-to blog (with International appeal) featured Lydia Barry Kutko in an interview a few weeks ago. You’ll get a strong sense of what she does and what Art Now Rockport is all about.
Meet Karen Tusinski
To gain insight into Karen Tusinski’s work, it is helpful (as it is with any artist) to take a look at her sketchbooks. They contain drawings that play with ideas for paintings of course. But they also contain little collages with lots of white space surrounding cut-out shapes and images that she pulls from magazines. She structures these “little bits”, as she calls them, in a way that is instantly recognizable as her work.
Interiors have long provided inspiration to our best painters — take Pierre Bonnard for example — there may be dozens of paintings of Bonnard’s kitchen table but every single one provides a different glimpse of a single life that somehow holds universal appeal. Although her oils are much more studied than Bonnard’s watercolors, Karen’s work can strike the viewer in the same way. She has an uncanny eye for the shapes and colors that fill our fields of vision – and which most of us never notice in any sort of conscious way.
A page from Karen's sketchbook
Karen focuses on the assemblages we create in our interiors: a bowl on a table, cut flowers grouped in vases, the backdrop of a patterned wall. She sees the shapes in our lives that are repeated in endless variations: circles and rectangles, lines that compose a grid. And while the scope of her paintings doesn’t extend to the exotic, the work truly feel expansive – in much the same way a real life interior can feel when it is created by someone with an understanding of shape and color, an understanding of the ability of the objects of our everyday lives to speak to us, long after each particular bloom in a particular bundle of poppies has faded to dust.
Karen Tusinski lives and works in the Cape Ann region of Massachusetts. She graduated with her BFA in Painting from Montserrat College of Art in 1998.
Karen Tusinski in her gallery. Photo by Mary Muckenhoupt.
Meet Nina Cassel Samoiloff, Sculptor
Nina Cassel Samoiloff is part of a new generation of artists with an acute awareness of the implications of living in a world with limited resources. Maybe the art created by this new generation could be considered an updated take on the same subjects that the 19th-century Romantic painters addressed: all those beautiful, hazy images of waterfalls and deep gorges, broad plains and far-off vistas were a sort of love letter to the natural world. Now those images are being replaced with images depicting stuff, mostly stuff we are in the process of consuming or throwing away. If so, Nina’s work falls squarely in this new tradition.
Nina Cassel Samoiloff developed a strong appreciation of both nature and art as a child, spending summers in beautiful Chester, Vermont while growing up with a strong sense of artistic heritage as the great-granddaughter of Hermann Dudley Murphy, the prominent Boston painter & frame maker. One of four daughters and the second to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, Nina studied industrial design, focusing on furniture made out of wood, steel and cement. She inherited her great-grandfather’s carving tools yet never worked with wood in quite the way she envisioned after graduating from college. Instead she took on stints as a floral designer, a footwear designer and even a shop owner, spending several successful years curating her own home goods store. 
Nina’s growing awareness of the limitations of our resources juxtaposed against the beauty of her adopted hometown, the seaside village and art colony of Rockport, Massachusetts, compelled her to begin creating again. Ironically, many of the sculptures she makes are of wood and metal pieces, the same materials she used during her studies. Now, however, there is a decidedly different twist to what she fabricates. Nina only works with materials that have been discarded, man made objects discovered in the natural world washed up on the beaches of Rockport. She manipulates these materials without drastically altering the form in which she finds them, and each sculpture, showing both the signs of artifice and nature, serves as a reminder of our tenuous relationship with the the world we live in. Daily beachside walks with her dog provides her with plenty of material, and her finds are documented on her blog, Catch, where she posts images every day of her assemblages of pieces of lumber and especially of all the plastic detritus she finds, the artifacts of modern life.
Meet Lydia Barry Kutko, Art Now Presenter
Art Advisor Lydia Barry Kutko lives in New York, arguably the center of the art world, which gives her the ability to put her finger on the pulse of just what, exactly, is going on in the complex, at times intimidating world of art — both when it comes to making art and placing art. Lydia specializes in helping people find just the right pieces to build or begin their art collections, so knowing the commercial side of things is part of what she does — but she also has a strong aesthetic sensibility (she has a degree in Art History) which is foundational to her work.
Rockport is steeped in artistic tradition, one of the oldest art colonies in the U.S. But most people associate all of this with Rockport’s past — what they don’t realize is that artists are still living and working in Rockport today– and that the image of the maritime artist is not the only image that Rockport has to offer when it comes to painting. Contemporary artists also take advantage of that famous Cape Ann light, setting up their studios here and creating contemporary pieces that speak to the way we live. Right now.
At Art Now Rockport on September 17th, Lydia will feature Rockport’s current art scene while acknowledging its past. She offer a brief multimedia presentation showcasing the work of the five contemporary artists showcased at Art Now Rockport. Lydia is lively, upbeat, fascinating, and most importantly, deeply knowledgeable about the current art scene — which is helpful when it comes to giving context to what is taking place here in Rockport. Don’t miss this chance to catch, not only five emerging contemporary Cape Ann artists, but Lydia Barry Kutko’s take on art in Rockport.
Get to know Lydia a bit better; click her photo for a great Q&A session with her.
