Listening to Light and Color:
Water Works by Deborah Curtis and
Sooky Maniquant

New Haven Free Public Library Gallery
133 Elm Street (Lower Level) New Haven, CT

Artist Reception: Saturday, October 29, 2:00-4:00 PM

Guest Curator: Poet Richard Harteis
Sponsored by the William Meredith Foundation

The William Meredith Foundation and the Azoth Gallery present a two-person exhibit of artworks by Connecticut artist Deborah Curtis and French artist Sooky Maniquant at the New Haven Public Library Gallery.

Exhibition: October 15 - November 30, 2011

"I love using technology to capture what I find unusual and beautiful, which expedites the exploratory process for my creative statements. I enjoy nature as an infinite timeless array of light reflected upon mass, air and liquid igniting emotion through ones mind, body and spirit. Art to me is the sum expression of passion combining all these things in harmony, a marriage between the study of life and the media of technology. Most of her current works are in series.

Since the 1980s, Deborah has exhibited her art work in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. She has painted en plein air, and has often attracted media attention while rendering exteriors of Connecticut resorts, inns and sunsets along the Connecticut and Rhode Island shorelines. Deborah has taught a myriad of workshops: abstract, figures, animal portraits in pastels and mixed media collage in New London at Granite Street Gallery, Studio 33, and art classes in Norwich at Art Works, which featured a retrospective of her works in 2010. In 2009, she had a solo show of 18 portraits of women. She also teaches in private homes/studios and is commissioned for photography and art work.

Commentary by Richard Harteis:

In a remarkable series of dramatic monologs entitled HAZARD THE PAINTER, the poet William Meredith traces the life of his "imaginary playmate," an artist saddled with all the accouterments of middle class life in America: house, car, wife, in-laws, children, and cat. In one poem, Hazard notes,

"The cat is taking notes against
his own household. He watches.
Hazard would like once to see
things with the cat’s eyes, flat.

It seems to me in Deborah Curtis’ paintings that she has mastered the vision of Hazard’s cat. Like the canvases of Milton Avery, they are stripped of all unnecessary detail, landscapes reduced their purest essence, Platonic images if you wish, of ocean-ness, of what it really means to walk the beach alone on a summer’s day. While the work is clearly representational, it focuses on color relations and is not overly concerned with creating the illusion of depth as is most conventional painting. Like Avery or Matisse, such stripping away takes courage for one living in what is perhaps the country’s foremost bastion of landscape painters. The Lyme tradition runs deep as a deer tick after gardening in southeastern Connecticut. If you want photo realism or perfect impressionist landscapes, this is the place to shop. Some may find her work radical for being too abstract; some lovers of Abstract Expressionism may find it too representational. What is clear is that Curtis has developed her own unique voice which is always the mark of a serious poet or artist. In another HAZARD poem, the painter spends an afternoon skydiving and reflects:

The colors of autumn
are becoming audible through the haze.
It does not matter that the great masters
could see this without flight, while
dull Hazard must be taken up and dropped.
He see it.

Curtis sees it too, and "hears" color like a master which is why her work sings to us so beautifully.

For a painter, I would image water would be one of the most difficult subjects to capture, even more than light, or perhaps because of it. Light captured in a drop of water, or an ice crystal, or a breaking wave is as evanescent as a summer’s breeze. And natural light is central to her painting, which is why Ms. Curtis works so often en plein air. This harmony of light and color, particularly as it applies to water and seascape marks her as one of the regions finest new talents whose work we celebrate. If only Hazard and William were here today to enjoy it with us.

Sooky Maniquant

Sooky Maniquant was born in Vietnam in 1934 and brought up in the South Pacific. She studied in Paris, and traveled through the world, using every occasion to deepen her knowledge of Océanian, European, African, Asiatic, and most particularly of Japanese civilizations. Very early, she makes the choice to live, more often as not, on the Luberon, her “sacred mountain”, where she feels nearer to the “vivid forces” of Nature.

Maniquant first met William Meredith in Paris and Avignon when William was invited to participate in the Avignon festival. In the piece "After William Meredith," the Meredith poems are presented in both his original English and a French translation, juxtaposing the text with images rendered by Sooky Maniquant. "After William Meredith" places artwork and poems side by side, allowing the viewer to experience Meredith's work from two different perspectives: Meredith's verses and Maniquant's striking visual interpretations:

In 2002: Exposition "round in water, magic Circles" were variations on 20 poems of William Meredith and Richard Harteis at the European Center of Poetry of Avignon. In 2006 at the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London CT : "AFTER WILLIAM MEREDITH" Spiral Forces were graphic connivances of Sooky Maniquant on poems by W.Meredith and R.Harteis.

"It is the universe seized in its innermost transformation which is revealed, but remains surprising, by static as these chalk cliffs, boiling under the midday sun, terrorized by the heat and silence, dully crackling on the limit of exploding, a stilled furnace overflowing onto the whole space of canvas in a thick wave…. World in distress, but held back by the artist’s hand on the brim of emptiness…Solidified by the appearance, sealed into its vibrations, calm and taut as a mummified monster of a dormant weapon.” ~Paul-Louis Rossi

“Sooky Maniquant’s main preoccupation is to find in the mysterious existence of each one’s interior life (thing or being), and to translate this magic by her work, therefore suggesting, particularly for the works of 1963-1969, incomparable energy of volcanoes, beyond the “canvas” of the painted artwork. But reality complicates itself with the parallax “time-space” thus “perpetual movement” of which the artist will approach the research of expression more precisely in her collages from 1969. 1974, first tapestry: this material, treated in a very personal way, with its contours conceived in the mass of the work, enables her to pursue further in her researches: the continuity of the material, the heat and sphere of the surface, the vibrations of colours where the blacks and whites quiver, continue to express anxiety faced with the mystery of life. ~Henry Galy-Carles

"But," Richard Harteis writes, "the mystery of life is also the one of death, of suffering, of horror, and for Sooky is an obsession. As from 1994 she often combines this with poetry, in opposition to wars. She puts together stucco, which proclaims her despair, in long kit form installations. In 2001, she returned to photography as a means of expression."