Judith Jacobson in the News

Face Time by Edith Newhall for The Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, April 25, 2008

Stand back! You have to, in order to see Judith Jacobson's own face (or those of people familiar to her) emerging from her new paintings at Cerulean Arts. And even then, her hair, nose, lips, cheeks and chin are difficult to discern in these colorful oil-and-sand-on-canvas works. The skeins of painted lines aren't a new riff on abstract expressionism, you soon realize, but the wrinkles and crevices of her baby-boomer skin.

I prefer Jacobson's much smaller, black oil-and-sand underpaintings and rapidograph ink drawings, which show her face more clearly and seem more tangibly the result of her process of working from multiple photographs and direct photocopies of her face (yes, she presses her face to the actual machine).

Jacobson's underpaintings, in particular, capture the look of photocopies, with the tooth of the canvas showing through them. Their white edges add to the resemblance to paper, and suggest that she paints her works on unstretched canvas, then later stretches them with the intention of letting that unpainted edge creep over. Their velvety darkness also brings Seurat's drawings to mind.



A Judith Jacobson underpainting, "Looking Forward,"
oil and sand on canvas, at Cerulean Arts.


To link to the Philadelphia Inquirer article, click here.

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Cerulean Arts' First Newsletter

To help keep everyone up to date on all the activities at Cerulean Arts, we've issued our first newsletter for Spring 2008.  To receive future newsletters and updates by email, ask to be added to our mailing list at info@ceruleanarts.com

Click here to read the Spring 2008 Newsletter                           

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Jaime Treadwell in the News

Taken from X Symbols: Two Philly painters play the subconscious like a banjo by Roberta Fallon for Philadelphia Weekly
September 12-18, 2007

"The most successful artists use symbolism in an elliptical or ambiguous manner that allows humans to do what they do best—decode the subtext. Humans are natural decoders; we’ve been interpreting signs since the cradle. It’s not for nothing that car ads feature beautiful women caressing or looking longingly at the vehicle. Buy the car and get sex. It’s crude but it works.

P. Timothy Gierschick II and Jaime Treadwell are two young Philadelphia artists whose work is fueled by symbolism."

          

"Jaime Treadwell’s brightly colored landscape and figure paintings are symbolic tableaux. Pink—the shade in overwhelming evidence—colors the sky, the land and the people in it, and is itself a symbol of sickness in a post-apocalyptic world. Unlike Gierschick’s works, Treadwell’s paintings aren’t ambiguous. They’re clear cautionary tales.

Uniformed children—some with missing limbs—play in militaristic vehicles. Treadwell includes high fashion models in ’50s-era splendor posing for postapocalyptic Carnival Cruise Lines. The children aren’t particularly fierce, yet there’s weirdness in their faces. They’re like Caleb Weintraub’s ballistic babies seen at Projects Gallery last fall. In this world everyone wears a buglike helmet with an antenna that makes them look like they’re receiving messages from Big Brother. Several works replace the pink with dark brown voids of sea and sky, evoking the dark night of the soul and the dark varnish of a Dutch master’s painting.

The young girl in a boat in Exile II wears a Vermeer-like tunic and white blouse, and stares out serenely, evoking Thomas Eakins’ The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull). Treadwell, quoting from the masters, is like them in that his concern for humans and his love of nature is real."

To read the full article, please click here.

For additional images from the exhibition, visit Roberta Fallon's flickr site here.

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Taken from Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof's artblog, posted August 19, 2007 by Libby Rosof

            

"Neo-Pink, Jaime Treadwell's one-man show at Cerulean Arts Gallery, combines off-the-hook oil painting technique with a post-Apocalyptic world in cotton candy pink.

The lipsticky desolate landscapes with overturned vehicles and used-car-lot pennants or blobs of falling oobleck are sad and interesting. They have a sense of Mad Max finding his way through what's left and making the best of things."

To read the full article, please click here.

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Cerulean Arts & PhillyCarShare



Cerulean Arts is teaming up with PhillyCarShare, a non-profit organization and Philadelphia's premier car share service, by participating in their Key to the City program.  

Cerulean Arts is happy to offer the 16,000+ PhillyCarShare members a 15% discount.  Just present your incentive tag to receive your discount on our unique selection of decorative arts including handmade jewelry, vases, picture frames & more.  (Discount can not be combined with any other offer and excludes exhibition sales.)

For more information about the Key to the City program or to join PhillyCarShare, please visit www.phillycarshare.org

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Ann Northrup in the News

Down to the Sea by Edith Newhall for The Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, July 20, 2007

"Since 2001, Philadelphians have known Ann Northrup as the artist behind such monumental outdoor murals as Our Backyard at Capitol and Brown Streets, Pride and Progress on the William Way Community Center at Juniper and Spruce Streets, Growing Up in Germantown on Rittenhouse Street near Germantown Avenue, and Sandy's Dream on the Propper Brothers Furniture Store in Manayunk, at Levering and Main Streets.

But Northrup handles a far less grand scale and a far more quixotic medium than house paint with similar ease. Her plein-air watercolors of California's dramatic Marin County Headlands, close to her childhood home of Sausalito, capture the stark beauty of that rugged mountainous coastline by staying as emphatically stark in paint as their subjects - Fort Cronkite Beach, Tennessee Cove, Muir Beach, and Point Bonita Cliff - are in real life. They're a compelling argument for painting the outdoors outdoors.

PaigeS Jewelry at Cerulean Arts

Cerulean Arts was pleased to have Philadelphia jewelry maker Paige Bronk Schwab display her latest creations on May 6.

For those who missed the show - Cerulean Arts now has a new selection of PaigeS jewelry from which to choose.  Beautiful blue, green and pink gemstones are here just in time for the summer!  Paige's interests in color and composition are evident in her hand-crafted jewelry.  Each piece is created with carefully chosen precious & semi-precious stones, pearls, bamboo and shell.  Hand-knotted on silk thread or on a wire, PaigeS jewelry is sure to make a statement.  

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Taken from the article "From Dust Till Dawn" by Roberta Fallon in the January 24th, 2007 issue of The Philadelphia Weekly .

"By day Sarah Roche dusts and polishes precious objects in the Art Museum’s multimillion-dollar collection. By night she creates paintings and sculptures that translate her museum maintenance staff experiences into moody dreamscapes that evoke Alice’s descent down the rabbit hole.

By focusing on the art, frames and glass protection systems, Roche creates her own museum collection. It contains objects, but the main interest is the ambient experience of people and life intermixing in grand rooms filled with priceless wonders."

To read the full article, please click here.

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Taken from an article by Edith Newhall for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, January 19, 2007.

"To be an off-the-beaten-path gallery in Philadelphia seems more usual than not these days. Cerulean Arts Gallery, in the block of Ridge Avenue just south of the old Divine Lorraine Hotel, is typical of these newer spaces, and even closer to the heart of the city than many of them.

The works of Sarah Roche, which make up the gallery's third show since its September 2006 inaugural exhibition, were more than I expected. That is, I assumed Roche was a painter, which she is, but didn't realize she is also a ceramicist until another gallery-goer pointed out that the hulking janitor's cart in the center of the gallery, carrying spray bottles, dusters, and mops, was not evidence of a recent cleaning job but a porcelain work by Roche.

Along with the cart, Roche, who works as part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's maintenance crew, has made haunting paintings that express her insider's view of some of that museum's artworks, objects and period rooms, many of which contain her own face, figure or reflection.

Roche is not after facsimiles. Her cart is just a likeness of one, and her paintings are soft and moody, not even particularly finished-looking, like a song whose lyrics you've forgotten. What she has captured, you soon realize, is her mind's eye."  

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Article from Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's Artblog, posted September 18, 2006 by Roberta Fallon.

"Michael Kowbuz and Tina Rocha bought the three-story building at 1355 Ridge Ave. two years ago and had a lot of work to do on it (the floor in the gallery space needed replacing due to termite damage). But Tina's an architect and she designed what they wanted and with help from Clifton "Cliff Cliff" Grant, their next door neighbor whose Blues club is slated to open soon, they attacked the space and came up with something gorgeous -- light and airy and with a lovely big park-like rear garden in which they hope to put a pond.

Kowbuz, Director of Continuing Education at PAFA and himself a PAFA alum (MFA, 1996) will be offering drawing lessons out of the back space starting in January and speaking of the back, the gallery's large front room opens on a slightly smaller space that is a crafts boutique in the rear." To read the full article, please click here.

The innaugural show is a group show celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kowbuz's PAFA graduating class. Works by some of the town's power players (Pew fellows and Fleisher Challenge winners) dot the walls. Here's who's in the show: