NEW PAINTINGS

Wednesday, February 24 to Saturday, March 21, 2009

Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 to 5

Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts is pleased to announce new works by Catherine Courtenaye. Ms Courtenaye’s previous show with us was in the spring of 2007.  We are happy to say the work was wonderfully received here in New York and elsewhere. Ms Courtenaye is a long time resident of California, this was her first New York solo exhibition. One of her images from the show, Bricklayers’ Work, was placed in the Loan Collection for the NEA selected by Dana Gioia, then Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts, under the last administration.

                          Moniker 11 (EB), 2008, 12 x 12 inches, oil on panel

Another large painting from the show, Wilhilmena, was placed with the Collection of the Oakland Museum of California. Many of the other works are now in fine private and corporate collections in New York. 

From her new body of work, we are presenting twelve, 12 x 12 inch, paintings on panel, and three 20 x 30 inch paintings on canvas. This small format makes for very seductive viewing. From her collection of American 19th century practice books, ledgers and various documents, Courtenaye transfers—using a variety of printmaking processes—phrases, signatures and sums onto her painting surface. These graphic quotations (from an era when learning cursive writing was a path to self improvement) are one of the basic elements of her painting, along with the skillful use of painted layers. Multiple delicately blurred layers hide and reveal past lives. Recently she has been adding a fine curling and wandering black line reminiscent of Victorian marginalia, and using a wide brush to make bold, strongly contrasted loops and gestures, reflecting the curves of letterforms. The small format makes what might have been a detail in a larger canvas an entire composition here. Each of the 12 inch square panels has the quality of small universe of activity and time captured.

This work has a powerful personal expression: Courtenaye’s art, always elegant, with the addition of the artist maker’s personal assertions, is all the more beguiling. 
 
 
 
Ghostwriters
New paintings by Catherine Courtenaye
March 7 to April 7, 2007    

Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 7,  6 – 8 pm

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm  

Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts is pleased to announce our first exhibition with Catherine Courtenaye. The artist’s layered paintings appropriate text from nineteenth century American notebooks. Scanning some of the titles of her works gives one a window into the person laboring to uplift his or her self through the skill of fine penmanship; the artificers, bricklayers or glaziers are just a part of the cast of characters taking part in this nationwide craze for self-improvement.

Abracadabra 10 (Plum Bracket) 12 x 12"

Yet the rigid confines of Victorian writing technique are just the starting points for the artist’s lushly colored and atmospheric works. In Courtenaye’s words, "vestiges of elementary mark-making—alphabets, signatures, equations—serve as counterpoints to my looser treatment of line, edge and space. One hundred and fifty years later, my paintings navigate between the rigors of those perfect lines and my own imperfect brushes."

In her recent work, Courtenaye deploys the marginalia found in penmanship manuals and other period documents. As viewers we feel a connection to these stray marks, and immediately relate to the individual who made them. "One can see the human impulse to let the mind stray, with pen in hand," the artist notes. "Digital technology has replaced the handwritten page—but the unselfconscious expression found in these arrangements and drawings will forever remain the mark of the humans who make them..."