Room to Bloom

the 59th annual room to bloom celebration kicked off this week!  the events support the mint museum of art enabling the museum to enhance its educational programs and acquire new works for the permanent collections.  hidell brooks gallery is proud to be a sponsor of room to bloom.

wednesday kicked off with a bang starting with the decorative arts symposium.  over 500 hundred southern women gather together to listen to a guest speaker, have a seated lunch after and a silent auction as well. this years guest was celerie kemble.  she joins a growing list of well know interior designers to speak including bunny williams, miles redd and charlotte moss. hidell brooks donated a cut out by selena beaudry to the auction that was very popular.  

celerie kemble was delightful and refreshing.  she and her mother, mimi mcmakin, are partners in kemble interiors which was founded in palm beach.  she has spent the last 15 years designing unique spaces that fit her client's needs.  she wants a home to be used and all parts to be functional as well as beautiful.  everyone attending the symposium received a complimentary copy of celerie's new book black and white: and a bit in between courtesy of wells fargo.

Black and White (and a...

the night ended with a commencemint party honoring celerie kemble in the gardens of a beautiful home in myers park. cocktails and hors d'oeuvres by porcupine provisions were delicious including the cup of french fries!  it was a wonderful day spent supporting the arts.

house beautiful

check out the may issue of house beautiful magazine.  our client's lovely apartment in nyc is on the cover! interior design is by christina murphy who is based in new york and was named one of america's Top 100 designers by house beautiful.  

 

chris hayman's amazing abstract painting is shown in their living room flanked on either side by two bookcases with black and white wallpaper in the shelves.  it is very dramatic!  two landscape paintings by eric aho can be seen in the study.  we love a great mix of traditional and contemporary.

art, art + more art...quick excursion to ny

we have just returned from a fabulous weekend in nyc.  we stayed down in chelsea at hotel americano amongst all the art galleries so we felt very much at home.  the hotel was designed by enrique norten, ny based mexican architect, the recent recipient of the mies van der rohe award for latin american architecture.  it is stunning to say the least.

interior design by mch(arnand montigny), their first state side project.  well known for designing collette in paris.  everyone at the hotel was lovely.  rebecca took full advantage of the bike rentals.  biking all the way up to 125th street on the hudson river greenway bike path! 

now to all the art!  aside from hitting almost all the galleries is chelsea which is close to 75 +, we were most excited about the affordable art fair.  the fair consists of about 40 galleries with everything under $10,000.  we saw lots of artists we think would look amazing in our collector's homes here.

we had the pleasure of having dinner with hidell brooks gallery's architect who is based in nyc.  she was still at harvard getting her degree in architecture when she designed the gallery 14 years ago.  lindsay smith will be speaking at the mint museum on may 15th at 7 pm as part of their series on design.  this was the gallery brand spanking new back in 1998!

we loved our dinner at the red cat in chelsea.  highly recommend the light tempura green beans with the sweet hot mustard and any of their desserts!


just in! bill braun

new trompe l'oeil paintings by bill braun have arrived at hidell brooks just in time for our opening next week. literally from the french, trompe l'oeil means “trick the eye”.  bill braun aims to convince the viewer, at least for a moment, that what they see are actual objects and not a painting.

 

you will be compelled to touch them they look so real!  we welcome you to come by the gallery and take a look in person.  you will be tricked!

grapes + scorpions

hidell brooks is honored to sponsor various youth sports teams.  currently our all girls moppet soccer team through charlotte junior soccer is in it's third season.  our first season no one had played soccer before obviously at the ripe old age of four.  we were slow to start as in what are we doing out here on a field but fast to learn.  last fall they went undefeated but officially score is not kept in the 5 year old league!  

 

everyone has a blast and gets lots of exercise.  as an ode to hidell brooks gallery their shirts are purple and they voted to call themselves the grapes.

 

we also sponsored the scorpions for the first time last fall.  a basketball team at the dowd ymca of 8 and 9 year old boys.  the scorpions made it all the way to the finals but lost by two buckets in the final minutes.  go scorpions!

painting of the week!!

rana rochat, 2011, oil + encaustic on paper, 38 x 27 inches.

rana rochat's circular motif is elegant and sophisticated.  her color is saturated and the layers of wax provide depth to her beautiful abstract work.

rana's artist statement:

there is a universal fragile balance between order and chaos, reason and spontaneity that my paintings try to capture. they are pictorial metaphors of this fragile balance using marks, forms, colors, as well as the luminosity and visual depth afforded by the encaustic medium.

the forms and marks are natural and seemingly familiar, yet they are nonspecific, not easy to 
label. i intend for them to be fluid, without fixed meanings. within an environment of deep light 
and color, my goal is to create an experience that is pre-verbal, promoting pictorial awareness 
prior to any explicit formatting of perceptual experiences into narratives. i like to think of my 
paintings as visual poems.

my idea is that narratives sacrifice intuition, gut feelings and the profound experience of 
mystery that a painting has the potential to provide. my forms and marks, with their apparent 
weight, particular vitality, and inertia live in a luminous and transparent environment.

exhibition opens for chris metze & chris terry

new paintings by both chris metze and chris terry arrived at hidell brooks gallery this past week.  the two artists paint in totaling different styles but their work compliments each other beautifully!

chris terry is an artist and professor at utah state university.  he is the recipient of numerous awards as a painter including the utah visual artist fellowship, and a WESTAF/NEA fellowship in painting. he has twice been the recipient of a fulbright fellowship for teaching and research in germany and in 2000 was a visiting artist at the american academy in rome.  an except from chris terry's artist statement:

"the central theme of my work is the ability of light to transform. although i select and place my subjects carefully, they are mostly drawn from the insignificant artifacts of everyday life. they lack a strong ego and without the stage i build for them, they would likely be overlooked. the interiors I choose are similarly anonymous. i’m drawn to these spaces and objects that lack a strong individual presence, and i rely primarily on light to transform an abandoned interior and enigmatically placed object into a secular altar."

chris metze is a dual citizen of the united states and canada. born in 1973, he grew up in both montreal, quebec and brooklyn, new york. he studied painting and sculpture at the emily carr institute of art and design in vancouver, british columbia. chris metze lives and paints in woodstock, ny.

his abstract paintings are stunning and their complexity brings you in slowly.

the opening reception is this friday april 6 from 6 to 8 pm. all available paintings are on our website but we would recommend seeing these amazing paintings in person! the show runs through april 28.  look forward to seeing you soon.

sneak peek--selena beaudry

we recently had the pleasure of visiting the new studio of selena beaudry conveniently located a couple of blocks from the gallery...thank you selena!  the sneak peek of the new body of work for her first solo exhibition at hidell brooks blew us away.

she has been busy creating both paintings and her unique cut outs.  her vibrant paintings are bursting with energy and color.  the brush strokes are loose but precise.  half of the paintings are focused on fuchsia, melon, red, purple with a bit of black and green thrown in the mix.

the other half are more subtle, primarily blues and grays with a tad of pink and black.  these paintings are not shy, they are boldly gorgeous!

selena's cut outs are beautiful sculptural paper.  the idea started when selena was not satisfied with a few large watercolors and did not want to just throw them away. so she tore them up and began creating small sculptural works.  by using archival glue, the pieces of painted paper are built up to create intricately layered compositions that are intense in color and amazing in their formation.  they are made with precision, patience, and time.  the larger cutouts weave and wander across the paper.  you will fall in love with them all. 

hidell brooks gallery is so excited about selena beaudry's solo show july 13-august 31, 2012. selena received her mfa from the tyler school of art in philidelphia, pa.  she currently lives and works in charlotte, nc. 

another reason to look forward to summer.