A Cool Drink of Water : Doug Foltz

Sizzle. Sizzle. Melt.

That’s what it feels like in Atlanta and much of the South these days. Anyone who is smart (or has a lake/beach house) has fled the city for a cool respite, and we wish we were with them!

If you can’t get to the water, we’ll help bring the water to you. Some beautiful new works by artist Doug Foltz just arrived at the gallery, and they’re the next best thing to being near the beach. You want to dive right into his cool, refreshing seascapes. I can almost feel a soft breeze as I stand in front of the lovely Haven…

Doug is a master of finishing his compositions just enough to get the wheels turning in your head. He leaves room to breathe, come up with your own stories and assumptions about the scene. He’s interested in showing the relationship between the horizon and the water – in Haven it’s a more equitable relationship, whereas in some of his other pieces, the horizon is more dominant.

The Summons

Tide Line

Doug has incorporated warmer tones and more detailed foregrounds into his newer work, as seen below in Breakfast in Darien, and also to some degree in Haven. The sunny yellow marsh grass contrasts with the ominous sky, yet the feeling evoked is fresh and clean – like the way the air feels right after a good summer storm. I like to think that those storm clouds are moving on out and a lovely, cooler (i.e. less humid) afternoon is about to unfold before me.

Where are you heading this summer to escape the heat? We always have the air cranked down in the gallery so feel free to come cool your heels here while you’re running errands around town!

Tata!

Sarah

Hooked on…Books: Part II

Huffington Book Club

This post is a continuation of Tuesday’s “Hooked on…Books: Part I.” Reading is one of the most popular Huffington pastimes, and we couldn’t fit all of our bibliophile love into one post.

Ann’s Picks

I’ve been going through a Paris phase, which will surely make it into a blog at some point, and as a result, I keep reading everything I can get my hands on that relates to Paris.

Oddly enough, I have had four copies of “A Moveable Feast” in the last few years, but with my strange habit of leaving the book on planes, trains, automobiles and hotel rooms, I haven’t actually managed to finish it once since I first read it in my twenties. Freud may have something to say about this, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s simply frustrating!

Many years ago, Meg and I first bonded over our mutual like for “Cooking for Mr. Latte” which is a well-written love story by one of the food editors at the N.Y. Times, filled with self deprecating humor and delicious recipes. The illustrations remind me of Meg and something tells me that if we Huffingtons ever met the writer, Amanda Hesser, we’d all be bff’s. So when Meg recently recommended the book, “Lunch in Paris,” and said it was a Parisian version of Mr. Latte, I jumped on it and had to agree that it was highly entertaining, delicious and well written. In fact after borrowing Meg’s copy, I actually had to go out and buy my own (hard copy!) because the recipes were so irresistible.

On our most recent trip to Paris, Mr. Marathon and I decided to visit our favorite book store, Shakespeare & Co., known for being a literary hangout of American expats in the 1920’s. Not exactly fashioning myself as one, I asked the salesperson if she’d ever heard of “Lunch in Paris” and she said, “Oh God, not another American girl meets French boy in Paris” love story?” Clearly, she’d never heard of it.

Somewhat apologetically I said, “Well, yes, actually it is … but this one’s really well written” (trust me!) to which I was greeted with an exasperated roll of the eyes and a sarcastic, “I’m sure it is.” No but really, I insisted, it’s great! You should get it! As the eyes continued to roll, my husband nudged me slightly, and said, “It’s OK.” Not everyone will believe that this is a delightful book with some serious undertones and seriously delicious recipes, but I happen to know that that is their loss!

And, on this same Parisian note, I am three pages from finishing “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” probably one of the most universally popular books of the last few years. When I started to read it, several weeks ago, I thought it was so philosophically boring and pedantic, that I questioned the dozens of people who’d recommended it.

In all fairness, I am reading it in French, and although I’ve always considered myself to be fairly bilingual and as comfortable in French as in English, this book makes Proust seem easy!! It took me several nights to get in to it, and still I questioned and cursed all those responsible for my nightly mystery (but at least I fell asleep fast!). Now, I am devouring every last delicate and delectable detail with my only regret being that there isn’t more of it to savor. I don’t want to put it down. I don’t want it to end. It’s like a trusted old friend that you never want to leave. It’s become a part of me. An extension of my soul.

It’s exactly what a great book should be and the reason we all still love to read.

Sarah’s Picks

After finishing my dissertation last fall (about the Charleston art market - a lovely topic - but 30,000 words about anything can be a bit of a chore), I had a long list of “fun & fluffy” books that I wanted to read while my brain took a rest from heavy lifting. Currently on my bedside table…

I finally decided to see what all the Emily Giffin hoopla was about, and I’m hooked! I breezed through “Something Borrowed” and “Something Blue” in a day apiece, and now I’m onto “Baby Proof,” “Love the One You’re With,” and her new release, “The Heart of the Matter.”

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Dorothea Benton Frank’s fantastic accounts of life in the Lowcountry. Her new book, “Lowcountry Summer: A Plantation Novel,” comes out in June, and I can’t wait to read it.

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My guilty pleasure is Lauren Willig. I’m currently on the fourth book,“The Seduction of the Crimson Rose.” The series chronicles Harvard graduate student Eloise Kelly’s, attempt to uncover the identity of the England’s most famous spies, the Scarlett Pimpernel, the Pink Carnation, and their cohorts and fellow spies, in order to complete her dissertation. Each book flip-flops between present day and the 17^th/18^th centuries, when relations were tense between England and France and spying was at its heyday. If you enjoy historical fiction, you will love these books!

Rachel’s Picks

I’m currently enjoying “The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism.” The Bauhaus group was a group of avant-garde artists living in Germany during the volatile interwar period 1919-1933. They believed in combining form and function to create a beauty in the industrial (they were the ones to come up with stackable chairs!).

I love reading the stories of this group of artists who blew the art world out of the water in 1919 and continue to shape our culture. This book is broken up into 6 sections, with one artist per section. So although the book seems long you can pick and choose which artist seems most interesting to you. It's a really personal look at artists, whose work is usually all you get to read about.

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In other news, Doug Foltz’s solo show last Thursday was a smashing success! Thank you to everyone who came out to support Doug and view his beautiful new work. Erin Hollenbank, of the Atlanta Art Critic blog, was kind enough to write a little review about Doug’s show. Click here to read it.

What’s a party without pictures? A very boring event, indeed. Click here to see photos from the event of Doug and his fans.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Tata!

HH

He’s brilliant- Part Deux

This is the second in our two part series on our very special artist, Doug Foltz, whose solo show, “Sea, Sky and the Space In Between,” opens on Thursday, May 6^th which is in just two days! Yeeks!

Actually, we’re probably more organized about this show than we’ve been in a long time, and that’s thanks to our amazing artist who has both left and right brain qualities, in droves. Our artists know how cranky we get when paintings arrive that are not wired, dry or even signed … and how we worship those who not only remember to do all three, but actually deliver ahead of schedule. (You’ll have to ask Doug if that was the inspiration for this painting, which was not only delivered but also sold just ahead of schedule!)

Just Ahead of Schedule – Sold

Doug has done us proud, with a wonderful, large selection of beautiful new paintings, in lots of different sizes with varying points of view.

Doug Foltz, Just a Little Longer, oil on canvas, 36 x 60”

“My painting is about exploring the feeling that comes from being there and from the act of painting itself, which I love. It’s about reaching that sweet spot where I have a wonderful exploration but achieve a sparseness that leaves enough room for other people to explore too. I want to be able to inspire that kind of exploration so that I can get the viewer as excited about it as I was about creating it. I’d like my paintings to force people to think on their own and come up with their own feelings about what they mean.”

Doug pulls from his experiences in his beloved Bahamas (think Marsh Harbour, Tiloo Cut, Elbow Cay…), as well as the Southern coast and Maine. If you know those parts of the world, you’ll feel an even greater empathy with Doug’s paintings. For example, we love the description he gave us for Rubicon (a Huffington favorite) “It's a high view of the outer break behind the bar at the Abaco Inn. It’s winter, the time of year when Elbow Cay catches those big African swells that come in off the ocean and form great waves in the distance. I like the low horizon because it helps to portray the sense of expanse that I love so much about all these outdoor places.”

Doug Foltz, Rubicon, oil on canvas, 30 x 30”

Doug also thinks long and hard about his titles, which are thought-provoking and evocative. We love A Momentary Opening and Learning to Look Both Ways. The Summons recalls Doug’s pull to the sea and A See-Through Silence perfectly captures that eerie, glassy calm when the winds die and the heat is shimmering off the flat sea.

Doug Foltz, Learning to Look Both Ways, oil on canvas, 48 x 60”

Doug Foltz, The Summons, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”

Of course, you need to see the paintings to appreciate the titles – so, if If you’re in Atlanta, we hope you can join us for Doug’s opening on Thursday, May 6^th from 6-8 p.m.. He’ll be here to say hello to friends and fans. We can’t wait! If you can’t make the show, we hope you’ll visit our website (http://www.huffharrington.com/) where you can view Doug’s paintings on your computer screen.

Getting up close & personal is part of art appreciation!

Tata!

HH

P.S. – Click here to read the Northside Neighbor’s interview with Doug, which just came out today!

He’s brilliant!!

Pardon our technical difficulties, but we're back in action now!

(a peek into artist Doug Foltz's studio...you'll love this one!)

By now, if you’ve been following our humble little musings on art, the gallery and life’s little pleasures, you know how much we Huffingtons adore (and we mean ADORE) what we do here at the gallery.

On the calendar for Thursday, May 6th, is “The Sea, The Sky and the Space In Between,” a one-man show by one of our faves, Doug Foltz. Doug came to us by way of some good friends and we were thrilled when he signed on with us. We were one of his first gallery experiences and still pretty new to the scene, so it’s been fun growing and developing together.

Meg & Doug

Doug invited us over to his little studio a while ago to discuss the show and review some of the work he already had in progress. We love Doug’s space. It’s the perfect artist’s studio – plenty of light, a good amount of space and every inch of wall space covered in either a painting or some tidbit of inspiration for Doug. Add to that Doug’s painting paraphernalia and it’s an art-lover’s dream.

The tools of the trade

Plenty o’ paint in order to mix the perfect shades of color for Doug’s amazing skies

Doug’s the perfect host (seems to be an innate quality for our artists or do they just know how to treat us?) and poured us both a nice little glass of red while we chatted and feasted our eyes on his paintings. He’s really fun to talk to and has a witty sense of humor - but also a very introspective and serious side that comes out when we discuss his work.

We like to joke about Doug that he was born with one foot in the water. As a kid in Miami, Doug spent every waking moment in a boat, sailing those pretty turquoisey waters between Miami and the Bahamas. He’s a quintessential outdoorsman and we think he is probably miserable when he’s cooped up and unable to be outside. In fact, it’s in his love of nature, and especially the water, that he finds his inspiration.

The Space In Between (in progress)

Rethinking Refuge (in progress)

Doug is best-known for his light-infused paintings that explore the sometimes calm and often stormy relationship between land, sea and sky. His paintings capture the enormous sweeping skies and horizons of the ocean; the luminous clouds; the sunlit seas and, as Doug puts it, “all the stuff in between.”

Doug Foltz, More Than A Minor Adjustment, oil on canvas, 24 x 30”

Doug Foltz, Tide Line, oil on canvas, 20 x 20”

He’s a methodical and thoughtful painter who works slowly, applying layers of oil paint that illuminate nuances and effortlessly portray light and water. All of his work has a clear focal point, that special “sweet spot” that draws you into the very essence of the painting. Many of his fans say that his work fills them with a sense of serenity and calmness and this is certainly true. There’s something elemental about Doug’s paintings: it’s just down to Mother Nature – and you. Not surprisingly, that’s exactly how Doug has planned it:

Doug Foltz, A Momentary Opening, oil on canvas, 36 x60”

If you’re in Atlanta, we hope you can join us for Doug’s opening on Thursday, May 6^th from 6-8 p.m.. He’ll be here to say hello to friends and fans. We can’t wait! If you can’t make the show, we hope you’ll visit our website where you can view Doug’s paintings on your computer screen.

Ann and Master Doug

And, stay tuned for Part Two of He’s Brilliant, coming next week.

Ta ta,

HH

How He Did It: J.M.W. Turner

Postcards from Paris...

I’ve always had a crush on J.M.W. Turner’s amazing light-filled paintings, and so you can imagine my thrill when I spotted posters of an ongoing Turner exhibit in Paris that popped up all over the city. Truth be told, the posters, showing a glimpse of what Turner is most famous for – his slightly abstracted, elegies to light -- were a little misleading, since they preyed on a trick that even we Huffington’s have been tempted to do when advertising a show, but shied away from … namely showing a close up of a portion of a painting rather than the entire painting. And, if you’re expecting a major retrospective of this artist’s incredible work, especially his later, more famous and definitely more ground breaking work, you may be disappointed.

But put those thoughts aside and if you are in Paris this summer, you must run, not walk, to this show! Held in one of my favorite buildings in Paris, the venerable Grand Palais, this jewel of an exhibit is an art history buff’s dream.

An aerial view and close-up of the Grand Palais

Rather than a broad retrospective, it takes a very specific point of view and focuses on Turner’s influences, including surprising artists that he downright copied. The exhibit shows the original painting next to Turner’s own interpretation and it’s absolutely fascinating. Some of the comparisons are so similar that they reminded me of the children’s game, “Spot the difference” between two paintings. (Note that we do not have access to the actual paintings in the exhibit, so we can’t do the comparison justice as the exhibit does.)

As a gallery owner, I was fascinated and bemused by Turner’s influences. There is no doubt that by copying the greats, including the princes of classical landscape painting, Lorrain and Poussin, or the master of light himself, Rembrandt, Turner was able to evolve eventually in to his own style using some of the principles of his classical training and stretching them so far that eventually his work took on a surrealist or abstract form.

And because of this, he was way ahead of his time, influencing in turn a whole generation of artists, from Manet to Matisse. But I guess that when I think of Turner, I think of his later work and never consider his classical landscapes. So I was properly fascinated by his early work and by its similarity to the masters whom he so clearly worshiped.

In the art world, we run into this a lot, where we try to draw the line between influence and copying. Most classically trained artists learn by copying others. And even some great grown up artists will take influence to an extreme. Didn’t Picasso and Braque copy each other so much that Picasso once said he couldn’t tell their paintings apart?

Braque, Violin & Pitcher, 1910

Picasso, Girl with Mandolin, 1910

Of course if you’re copying openly and crediting the source, that is one thing. If you’re merely stealing someone else’s originality and trying to take credit for it, that’s another. In the case of Turner, what was so interesting is to what degree he copied the greats and then to what a greater degree, he took those influences and pushed them to their limits.

One of my favorite paintings in the exhibit (but interestingly not one that we would ever carry at the gallery – snow scenes don’t fly in the South!), was of an avalanche in Switzerland.

J.M.W. Turner, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, 1810

First off, it’s painted on a diagonal, and the uncomfortable perspective actually reinforces the disruptive and forceful feeling of the avalanche (note, Japanese influence). Secondly, the strong foreground pulls you in to the painting immediately, and makes you feel like you’re in the storm. Thirdly, his use of palette knife makes the texture much rougher and gives the hard edges a violent streak. And finally, in classic Turner tour de force, it’s painted without realism which makes it actually feel more real. In other words, this painting is all about feeling rather than being descriptive in a representational way. Oh Mr. Turner – so ahead of your time!

I had to laugh at myself a few times during the exhibit. There were some paintings that were clearly influenced by others where I thought Turner’s interpretation was much less successful than his predecessors. There he was trying to paint Venice like Canaletto, but Canaletto’s palette and use of light was subtler and more beautiful.

Canaletto, Rialto Bridge

Turner, Rialto Bridge

Canaletto, Rialto Bridge

Canaletto, Veduta del Palazzo Ducale

Canaletto, Grand Canal from Santa Maria Della Carita

I know our artists will appreciate it when I say that Meg and I would have gently turned a few paintings down, had Turner brought them to our gallery. “Go softer on the blues,” we would say, “and go with gold to capture the luminescence of the sky.” It seems that even in a world class museum exhibit, I can’t help myself from being critical.

Turner, The Grand Canal, Venice

Turner, Venice

This is a jewel of an exhibit. Brilliantly curated, extremely well documented, perfect in length and broadly fascinating as it features incredible paintings by Turner and so many other masters as well. If you’re just even thinking of going to Paris this summer, this is an exhibit you won’t want to miss.

If you can’t make it to Paris, don’t despair! Our own wonderful artist Doug Foltz encompasses many Turner-esque qualities with his lovely diffusion of light and softly abstracted landscapes. A solo show for Doug is opening at our gallery on Thursday, May 6. Stop by the gallery between 6 and 8 p.m. to enjoy light refreshments and a comprehensive overview of Doug’s body of work.

Doug Foltz, A Reluctant Refusal, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”

Tata!

A.

P.S. – Congratulations to Gramercy on the debut of their new online store! Now everyone near and far can get their “fine linens fix” from this little shop of delights. Be sure to check out their blog too!