Lilah Heyman’s Friday Night (Nest) is a vivacious portrait of tangled bedsheets, but in its lavish attention to detail, it becomes a study of form as well — the wrinkles in the sheets, the way the light falls from crest to valley, become their own subject.
Her piece is part of the 124th Annual Juried Exhibition of the New Haven Paint & Clay Club, which, an accompanying note explains, is “the oldest continuously active art society in Connecticut.” The show features portraits, landscapes, and abstract canvases that in some ways couldn’t be farther apart in style, but are brought together and made into a cohesive whole.
The show runs through April 26 at the Hilles Gallery at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., concurrently with a retrospective exhibition at the New Haven Museum marking the club’s 125th anniversary, which runs through June 28. Also at the New Haven Museum, on May 1, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., there will be cocktails, live music, and a talk by Peter Trippi, editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur on the topic of why artist clubs matter. The CAW show can be understood as a warm-up to that talk. It makes the case for why the Paint & Clay Club persists: because it supports artists working across a wide breadth of style, subject, and media, and gives them a chance to be in conversation with one another.
Many of the paintings revel in the time-honored concerns of landscape artists, in capturing the world around them, and with that, a certain quality of light that feels immediately recognizable as belonging to the New England shore. Denise Eliot’s Nantucket Lifeguards — which portrays an empty lifeguard chair on a beach somewhere close to either dawn or dusk — exudes that hazy end-or-beginning-of-a-day quality that feels like the essence of summer. Eileen Eder’s Westbound shows a section of train track on a restless cloudy day familiar to anyone who has ever ridden the rails around here. And though Paul Huntley’s The Rose Cottage is ostensibly a portrait of a building, the real subject is his subtle, caring treatment of the luminous sky above it.
The abstract painters in the show, meanwhile, head to all corners. Patricia Carrigan’s January Thaw feels scraped by ice even with its rangey shocks of color. The scintillating colors in Kelly Taylor’s Sudden and Unexpected Joy feel almost like looking into the waves of a calm Caribbean bay. Regina Thomas’s Cross Roads mixes shapes, color, and paint texture to create a vivid canvas of depth and energy.
Some canvases manage to straddle the line. Lilah Heyman’s Friday Night (Nest) is a vivacious portrait of tangled bedsheets, but in its lavish attention to detail, it becomes a study of form as well — the wrinkles in the sheets, the way the light falls from crest to valley, become their own subject.
The same wide spectrum of pieces appears in the sculpture on offer, from Daniel Moore’s large-scale piece Eve, depicting the Biblical figure in the throes of biting the apple, to Adrian Pulidos’ glossy and inviting Pumpkin Patch, to Thomas Savovy’s Untitled, a rough-hewn humanoid figure that seems to be in the process of creating itself. Laura White Carpenter’s Pericardium conveys something of the importance and fragility of the anatomy it’s based on. It’s also a statement. The pericardium is a double-walled sac that protects the heart and facilitates its function. Put simply, it helps the heart beat — maybe something like what the artists’ club does for artists, and what artists do for us.
