Author: Michael Witthaus

Mosaic Art Collective celebrates October

An upcoming exhibit at a downtown Manchester art gallery will be equal parts harvest moon and hocus pocus, if the early submissions are an indication. Mosaic Art Collective holds monthly themed shows. In September, “Full Circle: The Speed of Light” offered works like the eclipse-inspired “Four Minutes of Totality, Twelve Hours of Light” and “Evil Eyes,” a kinetic piece made of metal and stained glass.

Mosaic founder Liz Pieroni hopes this month’s “Spellbound” will evoke the magical and mystical.

“There are a lot of artists that specifically only make creepy, Halloween-y kind of work,” she said. “There’s definitely some very witchy portraiture, a lot of skulls … and a creepy moon landscape pastel by Susan Markham.”

Also contributing is Jackie Hansen, known for absurdist takes on the natural world like “McChicken,” an acrylic on canvas painting of a barnyard bird peeking out from a McDonald’s fries container. “She does almost traditional New Hampshire art, but it always has a little bit of a twist,” Pieroni said. “This one is a chicken riding a broom with a witch hat on.”

Artist submissions will be available for viewing beginning Oct. 7, with a reception set for the afternoon of Oct. 12. In the spirit of the season, a tarot card reader will be on hand to tell fortunes at the event. These Second Saturday gatherings happen every month and in the recent past have included live music and comedy.

As always, the different works on display at “Spellbound” can be purchased and picked up at the end of the month. Mosaic encourages ownership, with prices befitting an aspiring art collector. Helpfully, each piece has its own QR code that links to a web page for interested buyers.

“In some ways it makes it more accessible,” Pieroni said. “People don’t necessarily want to figure out who to approach and how to purchase something, but everyone has a phone on them…. If you’re introverted in any way, this makes it a little bit easier to stomach.”

On any given day, Mosaic is abuzz with activity. Seesaw Art Gallery has its own space in the back corner of the second floor space, and artists work in individual studios. One, Hannah Cole Dahar, makes whimsical works like custom portraits of local women in saintly poses. It’s truly a collective, exactly what Pieroni had in mind when she started it.

Since graduating in 2005, she missed the art school vibe. Opening Mosaic “was about finding my own art community,” she said. “We all have our own separate spaces, but when we come into the gallery, it kind of automatically creates this swirl of conversation, which is comforting … it’s not just a big white room with art on the wall, it has a nucleus feel.”

So far, it’s been a good year.

“We saw a little bit of a slowdown in June, but I think it was just that people were kind of busy and out enjoying the weather,” Pieroni said. “We ended up taking the summer off and just recharging our batteries. September so far has been really great. We’ve seen a good amount of sales and a lot of new artists that haven’t shown with us before, which is really exciting. In general, I’d say things are on the up and up.”

There’s hope that growth is on the horizon, she continued. “We’re building out our program still. We’ve had a few little setbacks as businesses do. I think right now we’re just trying to get all our ducks in a row and find some funding … then build out a couple of bigger programs that hopefully we’ll see early next year.”

These efforts include recruiting volunteers. “The program we’re hoping to put together is volunteering that is kind of educational at the same time,” Pieroni said. “You could learn how to hang a show and host events, stuff like that, then walk away with an understanding of how things function so that you can go and do something similar.”

Spellbound
When: Begins Monday, Oct. 7, with opening reception Saturday, Oct. 12, at 4 p.m.
Where: Mosaic Art Collective, 66 Hanover St., Suite 201 (second floor), Manchester
More: mosaicartcollective.com

Featured image: Mosaic Art Collective. Courtesy photo.

Concord Chamber art exhibit

The Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce’s downtown Visitors Center is an oasis for art lovers. New Hampshire Furniture Masters and the New Hampshire Art Association both display works there. Currently, sculpture and otherworldly tables and chairs built by Jon Brooks are streetside, while 11 paintings from Yildiz Grodowski adorn the back wall.

Grodowski was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and studied there before moving to New England; she’s lived in the Boston area for most of her life. Speaking by phone recently, she described herself as “a semi-abstract artist, because there are always recognizable elements in my paintings.”

These include scraps of text: handwritten or from newspapers, magazines or sources, like the Viking cruise ship brochure found in the lively “One Step at a Time.” The latter work is part of a series called “Into The Woods,” which occupies the first half of her exhibit, “Where Will I Take You.” Its four pieces — there are more, she said — are evocative, playful and joyous.

The first, “Ménage a Quatre,” has a bird with bits of sky in its wings rising toward three Dali-esque windows capped by a staircase to the stars. Below this raucous activity is a street scene that looks cribbed from a mid-20th-century European fashion magazine. The next two, “Her Hands Were Watching Me” and “One Step at a Time,” are colorful and animated.

The final painting of the group, “Take Me to Where the Wild Things Grow,” is subdued. It’s also beautifully textured, another characteristic of her work. It’s an important reason why looking at photos of her art online can’t do them justice.

Her overall selection of works for the exhibit, which ends in early November, was done in hopes of holding onto summer as it fades away.

“I like warm weather, I don’t like winter, I don’t like cold,” she said. “That’s the reason I wanted to bring some color, something happy, something joyful, something optimistic.”

That said, Grodowski stressed that her art isn’t born from crunching around in the autumn leaves, even if it arrives in a bucolic place eventually.

“I love nature. I respect it so much, but it’s not my inspiration for some reason,” she said, explaining that the series’ title is “about discovery of a space, of a person, of oneself.”

For Grodowski, the creative process is as kinetic as her works suggest. The first stage, which she calls “the play,” always includes music played at full blast, and a lot of movement. “I don’t even think about creating movement,” she said. “It’s so intuitive, it comes from within, you know? I’m a dancer, so I guess my brush dances on the substrate as I’m painting.”

She often layers on an already prepared surface.

“I start with either collage or my own writings on the substrate,” she said. “Collage pieces can be almost anything. A lot of them have also numbers and writings … or I write myself. If I’m listening to a song, maybe I’m just writing the lyrics, or whatever happened the day before, or what I’m feeling.”

The middle stage is the longest, one she calls The Ugly. “Which is the struggle,” she wrote for artsyshark.com, leading to “refinement — the home stretch. With the exception of the last stage, during which I need absolute quiet, I blast the music, singing and dancing … and of course, painting.”

At that point, after the pasting, the painting and occasionally the sanding of surfaces, Grodowski can bond with the piece and sign her name to it.

“Connection is everything; that’s the foundation of my art, really,” she said. “Connection means … there’s nothing more I can add; it’s all I could give to that piece. Although many artists and many masters say, and it’s true, that no art piece, no painting, is finished … there comes a moment that you know — this is it.”

Hopefully, the viewer will be similarly lifted.

“I want to create something so they can find their own place and connection,” she said, noting that the exhibit title is a question, not an answer. “Rather than giving it to them, saying ‘Here it is, take it,’ I want to ask them what they see.”

‘Where Will I Take You’ – Yildiz Grodowski
When: Through Nov. 10, artist reception Saturday, Nov. 2, 6 p.m.
Where: Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center, 49 S. Main St., Concord
More: nhartassociation.org

Featured image: Works by Yildiz Grodowski. Courtesy photo.