Meet-the-Artist Michael Federov Saturday, Sept. 17, 11-2

Cooperstown NY—Artist Michael Federov, of Maryland, NY, will informally discuss his climate change paintings in Brave New World at the Art Garage with gallery visitors, Saturday September 17 anytime between 11am-2pm. Reservations are not necessary. Free admission. Guests are invited to bring their curiosity, concerns, questions and comments.

Despite spending a lifetime making art, Federov has not shared his work with the public since the 1970s, when he exhibited in Washington DC and New York City. Brave New World, the last show of the summer season, also features emerging artist, Lewis Danielski, in the Middle Bay, his first gallery show. Both artists present powerful accomplished work meditating on the anxieties and hopes that characterize the current moment – for the first time now available to the public. Federov’s richly textured and powerful series of paintings revolve around the ongoing climate crisis, beautiful to look at despite their ominous message. Danielski shares smaller, intimate multi-media explorations of queerness, belonging, and growing up. The show generates an intergenerational dialogue about the most important issues of our time.

Saturday September 17 and 24, the show will also unveil new art by Danielski, works he created after the exhibition opened in August and before he returned to his home in France, in a spcial Pop-Up New Art section in the Middle Bay of the Art Garage.

The gallery will be open Saturdays from 11-2 PM through September 30th, and as always daily with a text, call: 315-0941-9607 or leartgarage@gmail.com. Address: 689 Beaver Meadow Road, Cooperstown, NY 13326

About the Artists

Michael Federov spent his early years in NYC and Amsterdam, NY before settling in his current home in Maryland, NY. Aside from his long-standing commitment to art-making, he spent 30 years as an art teacher at Unadilla Valley Central School (New Berlin and South New Berlin, NY). He recently retired, but has not given up his belief in the power of art to educate. In his climate change series, Federov presents a “…catalog of maladies and circumstances caused by, or contributing to, climate change.” Each work in the series is numbered, staging the sequence of unfolding ecological tragedies as “…a countdown in reverse.” His work opens up a conversation about humanity’s environmental impact in the hopes of preventing future damage and loss and inspiring renewed preservation efforts. He rarely uses brushes, but rather has developed a unique technique using paint scrapers and Goldens Paint squirt bottles on Masonite and Arches paper. His delicate line work and the harsh activity of the scrape marks coalesce to remarkable effect. Using both representation and abstraction to express the many manifestations of the climate crisis, Federov paints from nature’s point of view in order to imbue emotion into the cycle of cause and effect. By creating a painterly record of each individual impact of climate change, he communicates the overwhelming stakes of the topic on an intimate scale. Federov earned his BFA at Pratt Institute (Brooklyn) and an MA in painting from SUNY New Paltz and comes from a family of artists originating from Russia. Federov’s family fled Russia after World War I, including to Czechoslovakia, where his mother danced at the Prague National Ballet until the German invasion. Prior to that, his grandfather, a noted set-designer, settled in Bulgaria before being exiled by Russian forces to Siberia, where he died. Humbly, Federov admits that his ancestors also include major composer Tchaikovsky as well as Eugene Zamyatin, a Russian author and contemporary of Maxim Gorky. The seed of creativity continues in Federov’s daughter, Ava, an accomplished artist and young art professor herself. An avid outdoorsman, his art is indelibly linked to nature and the environment. He paints full-time in a studio nestled in the woods on the banks of a creek in rural Maryland, NY, and cherishes his time in the dreamy semi-wilderness alongside his wife and their coterie of animals.

Lewis Danielski, whose grandparents lived in Cooperstown, grew up in France and Indonesia before completing his studies in the UK at the University of the Creative Arts (Farnham, England). Recognizing his creative spark at a young age, Danielski has spent his entire life making art. He has participated in workshops periodically, including one at La Métairie Bruyère (Parly, France), an internationally renowned printmaking center in France. The question of ‘home’ is one of his central themes. “[A]s someone who is very international—I don’t really have a singular home or place—I make home where I am and with the people I am with,” he said. In particular, his etching of a boy on a quilt reflects these ideas of comfort and home by reconfiguring the traditional bedcovering as a site of whimsical artistic play. His work also investigates queerness and the experience of being LGBTQ+ in public spaces. He noted, “Drawing without purpose is one of my favorite things and always helps to calm and ground me. It’s always been a way of getting hard feelings out and making something of them.”