Star Power Painting Blasts Off at Art Garage!

Till July 15

Cooperstown NY—The first show of the Art Garage summer season, Star Power Painting, features three exceptionally accomplished artists, Deborah Geurtze, Tracy Helgeson and Lilian Voorhees. Their stellar reputations are familiar to Art Garage afficionados, and their latest works always eagerly anticipated. The exhibition, which fills two of three bays at the garage and spills over into the third, can be viewed every Saturday, 11am-3pm, and daily with a text or call to 315-941-9607 (or email leartgarage@gmail.com).

The Art Garage is one mile from downtown Cooperstown at 689 Beaver Meadow Road, a pleasant (free) half-way stop between Origins Café and Bassett Healthcare.

Free admission.

Each of the three featured artists has developed an individualistic and distinctive vocabulary that has richly evolved. Deborah Geurtze, who divides her time between the Adirondacks, the Capital Region and Boston’s North Shore, offers magnificent, richly-textured landscapes layered with loose and luscious brushstrokes, installed in the Middle Bay. Tracy Helgeson, originally from Minnesota but now settled on a farm near Springfield, NY, presents radiant, iconic rural tableaux that meld into a kind of soft-focus magic realism, her brushwork all but invisible. Lilian Voorhees, whose work is perhaps the least often accessible to the general public, introduces a new body of work comprising stunning richly-abstract compositions, devoid of the natural world influences once subtly discernible in earlier work. She will discuss her work and her abiding attraction to abstraction in a free Gallery Talk on Thursday June 8 at 5PM.

The exhibition will be on view through July 15. Free public programs offered in conjunction with the show feature Artists’ Talks Thursdays June 8 and 15, Lilian Voorhees and Deborah Geurtze, respectively; and an Artists’ Panel Discussion Wednesday July 5, all at 5PM. The programs are free, though reservations are always recommended to assure a seat in the limited space. Contact leartgarage@gmail.com or text/call 315-941-9607.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

DEBORAH GEURTZE: In addition to several revered local landmarks in this exhibition – Shadow Brook and Leatherstocking Falls– Ms Geurtze also will reference the Adirondacks. At one time she artistically preserved sensitive viewsheds and rare wild habitats for the Park Agency. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Art and Design, SUNY Potsdam and Albany, Ms Geurtze made art in a Toddsville studio for 25 years before leaving the state for the Gloucester MA area. She is perhaps best known for her hand-colored etchings and monotypes which have garnered numerous awards in national juried festivals and in national and international shows. (Some of these will be available in a portfolio stand.) Her work is in public, corporate and private collections. Besides the Art Garage, museums and galleries that have featured Ms Geurtze’s work include the Everson Museum, the Yager Museum, Hartwick College, the Garrison Art Center and Old Forge Art Center. A renaissance person, Geurtze co-founded the reinvented Danny’s Main Street Market in Cooperstown, and also served as a board member and co-president of the Cooperstown Art Association for many years.

TRACY HELGESON attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts). Her luminous work is regularly exhibited in galleries in the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires. Fenimore Art Museum featured her work in 2017 in a solo exhibition. When with her young family she moved Upstate from Minnesota, she was “greatly inspired by the landscape….barns, structures, roads and farm scenes….” Trained as an illustrator, her art changed dramatically following the move: “I never really painted anything green before,” she noted. She honed her distinctive underpainting and glazing techniques that continue to evolve. Her work, per art critic Katherine Rushworth (Central New York Magazine), simplifies and reduces, “[pared down to ] the very essence of shape, color and texture. ” Rushworth noted elements of Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko in her work: “In some, she echoes the isolation…in Hopper’s work. In others, it’s the balance between figuration and abstraction [of] Diebenkorn’s paintings….and in yet others, it’s the color field style of Rothko’s work.”

LILIAN VOORHEES grew up on the Philadelphia ‘Main Line’ and attended the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, in the early 1970s, a formative time of art-making in the US and internationally. She then moved to TriBeCa (below SoHo), NY, then an industrial area where pioneer artists could afford to live before it was “discovered.” She exhibited exclusively at the Andre Zarre Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district until she permanently moved to the hills of Hartwick, NY, with artist husband, James Herman. Though rooted in abstraction, her oil paintings took on the lay of the land on their Hartwick farm subtly, thematically divided into ‘woodlands’, ‘wetlands’ and ‘gardens’. Today they are unabashedly abstract, endlessly inventive patterns created by the tension between “intuition, intention, control and its loss…. [witness to the] turns, exits, and entrances of the unexpected…..the dialogue between me, the painter, and my painting.” Like Helgeson, she regularly exhibits her ambitious and very beautiful work at the Art Garage, as it continues to evolve in intriguing and exciting ways. Please see FB / Instagram, ArtGarageCooperstown, for images and more information.