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August 8-23, 2015
Reception: Sunday, August 9, 2-4pm
Gallery Talk: Sunday, August 16, 2-4pm
Long Island is rich with artists whose creativity was inspired here. Little did South Shore photographer Holly Gordon know when she facebooked North Shore watercolor painter, Ward Hooper, that creative sparks would ignite into a magical collaboration and friendship. The Brush/Lens Project is a contemporary union of two artists. Ward’s on sight paintings and Holly’s painterly images of the same locations give the viewer a unique opportunity to see side-by-side creative interpretations of the same subject…and along the way they discovered that many of their locations for inspiration were rooted in the fertile ground of Arthur Dove and Helen Torr, celebrated early American abstract artists who lived and worked on the North Shore of Long Island 75 years ago.
Hooper and Gordon led independent lives for decades until social media brought them together to discover that they lived in parallel universes. Each has a long history of honors, exhibitions and published work. Helen Harrison, art critic for the New York Times, called Ward’s paintings, jazzy. Ward taught at the Art League of Long Island for 12 years and is represented by LaMantia Gallery in Northport, NY. Holly is a working photographer whose work is frequently viewed as paintings. Merle English, in writing for New York Newsday descries her images as absolutely enchanting. She is an artist with the Long Island photography collective, fotofoto gallery in Huntington. When Topaz Labs, a prominent digital software company, saw some of Holly’s work with Ward’s paired images, they immediately became a sponsor of this exhibit.
Read Bridget Shirvell’s LI Pulse Magazine article about Holly and Ward