Spatial archetypes: linda sokolowski

186 STATE ST.

Exhibition And EVENT Dates: 1 November - 28 December 2024

Opening Reception: Friday, November 1st, 6-9PM (artist will be joining us for the opening reception)

Artist’s Talk, Poetry Reading, Recorder Ensemble: (Save the Date) Saturday, November 23rd, 1-3PM (more info to come)

Mid-Exhibition Reception: December 6th, 2024, 6-9PM

Artist’s Statement:

I am a painter-printmaker of numerous rejects. However, those, my unresolved prints, retain area strengths that are intriguing and often rich in form. So instead of dispossessing them, I welcome them, saving their heartiest living fragments in my large drawers of significant collage needs to be retained for possible future needs, sometimes a decade later.

 In the early 1980’s I had begun a view into a marsh just down the hill from my studio in Bethel, New York. I had come to this water space before in my work, but this time it had evolved into a 40” x 40” image fronted by a beautifully sculpted beaver dam and backed in the distance by mountains. This portrait of the site was doing little for me until I had returned to the studio and saw another unresolved work waiting for my response. Its sky shape was washed in Paynes Gray, that lush translucent grey blue violet that often gifts before a storm. Cutting the first, away above the horizon line along the mountains base, I decided to pair the primary parts of the two images, layering in the rain sky above my marsh bereft of the mountains. The image immediately popped into 3D reality. I had found the lost shape I had needed. The element of surprise was a true gift, as now I stood at the edge of the world, at what seemed to be the ocean in an exciting first seen space.

 There are collages and there are papiers collés. The latter translates (according to Wikipedia) as “pasted papers” which are a form of collage that is closer to drawing than painting. Most of my works relate to the latter (papiers collés) so they begin with drawing (especially those for which I rely on a source), are then worked with paint and at last come to fruition through gluing and weaving small, printed textures and movements into the still-developing image.

 Though collages call for trustworthy instinct, they also beg for more design rationales, more formal structure, I believe, than drawings do from direct sources. When I draw, for example, few design concepts occupy my image-making during a search for significant form within what I’m observing. There is a constant contact between me and my source, be it the figure, still life or landscape. My job is to retain that contact, to not lose sight of its life force from the start. Picture dynamics are determined naturally, instinctively while drawing.

 The smaller works begin without preliminary drawings and paintings, but rather with a clean slate upon which exciting forces in generous collage shapes begin to design a space together on an empty ground of white or color. These continue to be moved about until the related pieces represent a believable spatial site. Here, the space is discovered, found, not seen from an existing landscape. This way, one collage shape gets me started. These are invented space made without sources. I want them to feel as “real” as those works from the lands I’ve seen and been inspired by and have thus continued to work in my studio. Both approaches (begun from drawings or started from a dynamic collage shape) are valid and necessary paths to my image-making. But mind you, you must use your own rejects. They are there and will make themselves known.

Artist’s Biography:

Linda Robinson Sokolowski (Professor Emeritus, Binghamton Univerisity)

 Sokolowski, having begun intense studio work at Rhode Island School of Design, spent her senior year in Rome with the school’s European Honors Program. Those eight months drawing in the Roman Forum, Hadrian’s Villa and the hill towns of Tuscany initiated an independent vision of landscape sites that are implied records of remarkable human endeavor. After having received her BFA in painting from R.I.S.D. in 1965, she chose the University of Iowa for graduate work in printmaking, after having seen Mauricio Lasansky’s “Nazi Drawings” at the Whitney. Determined to continue her study of intaglio (after Michael Mazur’s “Closed Ward” influences at R.I.S.D.), she chose Lasansky’s superb print workshop where she completed her M.A. with her written thesis, The Original Prints and Restrikes from the Plates of Kaethe Kollwitz.

In 1971, after having been for several years the assistant to the painter James Lechay and after having received her MFA in printmaking, she was invited to become Instructor of Drawing at the University of Iowa during the summer months. That same year she accepted a full time Department of Art faculty position at Harpur College, SUNY Binghamton (Binghamton University), later becoming head of printmaking while continuing to be a primary influence in drawing for over three decades. She was known for her glue that connected monotype and intaglio printmaking respectively to painting and sculpture, as she enthusiastically designed substantial problems for her students who thrived from those connections.

Sokolowski's paintings and works on paper have been shown primarily in New York City through Kraushaar Galleries where she presented ten solo shows in the thirty-three years she was represented by that gallery under Antoinette Kraushaar, Carole Pesner and later Katherine Kaplan Degn. In 2007, her landscape retrospective, entitled The Earth's Stage, was mounted at the Roberson Museum and Science Center in Binghamton, N.Y..Since that exhibition, she has been involved with six series of large monotypes and paintings:
Cathedral Facades; The Coasts of New Zealand; The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak;
Volcanic Fields; The Life of Death Valley, and The Mountains Surrounding Tucson.

Sokolowski received the Childe Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and several research grants from the State University of New York. She has participated in group exhibitions at many venues including Arkansas Art Center, the Butler Institute of American Art, McNay Art Institute, Munson- Williams-Proctor Institute, the National Academy of Design, Pratt, Rhode Island School of Design and the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution. Her work can be found in the public collections of the Library of Congress, PepsiCo, the Pushkin Museum, Moscow and many universities.

The artist actively maintains printmaking and painting studios in Bethel, New York where she works and lives with her husband Robert. They travel to sites that her work requires….the Southwest’s canyons, Hawaii’s, Ecuador’s and California’s volcanic craters, Italy’s ruins and structures on water, Germany’s river towns and cathedrals, the temples and pyramids of Guatemala, Mexico and Egypt, and Peru’s Incan structures. Locally she is inspired by a landscape of abandoned spaces, its pools, silos, bridges and its surrounding wetlands and fields. In addition to interpreting the earth’s structures, Sokolowski continues to work figuratively with inspiring models.