New Haven Register
Sunday, October 3, 2004

INSIDE THE ARTISTS' STUDIOS
Gearing up for City-Wide Open Studios, five artists offer a preview
by
Aviva Luria

Marcel Duchamp claimed the artist does not create art alone: The spectator contributes through the acts of deciphering and interpreting.

One event that subscribes to this theory is Artspace’s annual City-Wide Open Studios. Now in its seventh year, it will span three weekends in October, during which artists will invite the public to hold up its side of the equation.

Among the locally prominent artists returning to CWOS are painters Anna Held Audette, Howard Fussiner, Constance Lapalombara, and Ken Grimes. This year’s participation of roughly 500 artists, working in myriad media, sets a record for this event.

Beginning Tuesday, all CWOS artists will display work at Artspace, 50 Orange Street in New Haven’s Ninth Square. There’ll be a free opening reception Friday from 5 to 8 p.m.

Over the first weekend, Oct. 9 and 10, doors will open at the studios of 60 artists and in several small studio complexes around the city. Free guided bicycle and bus tours will leave from Artspace on both days at noon. (Advance registration is required.)

Open Studios coordinator Johanna Bresnick said getting a glimpse of how life and art intersect for individual artists is one of the unique opportunities CWOS offers.

“Conrad Duenkel has a glassblowing workshop in an old barn in back of his house in Fair Haven,” Bresnick said by email. “The upstairs, which serves as a display area, is crammed with every imaginable thing made of glass. Chickens live in a coop alongside the barn.”

Over Weekend II, Oct. 16 and 17, the public will get to glimpse the work spaces of 100 artists at Erector Square. Photographer Andrew Hogan and painter Blinn Jacobs are two of the noted Erector Square artists who are first-time participants.

On Oct. 23 and 24, Weekend III, artists will exhibit their work in vacant downtown commercial spaces (all within two blocks of Artspace), as well as at the Beecher and Barnard schools, two 1920s-era buildings slated for renovation.

The work of New Haven youth will also be on display. Eighteen students from New Haven public high schools, nominated by their art teachers, will take part in CWOS Jr., and will exhibit their work at 55 Church Street.

More details and a map of studio locations will be available at Artspace.

Below is a taste of what you’ll encounter over each of the three weekends.

Megan Craig, landscape painting

Goshen native Megan Craig began painting cityscapes in 1997, when she moved into a sixth-floor Brooklyn apartment.

“I loved the way my brushstrokes seemed to match the chunky geometry of the city,” she wrote in an email. “In New York, painting helped me feel at home and find my way in unfamiliar territory. I always knew what the tops of buildings I had painted looked like, even from the streets.”

Craig, a New Haven resident, majored in philosophy and minored in art at Yale. Now she is working toward her doctorate in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.

How do these two disciplines intersect? “I feel I paint better when I am doing a lot of active thinking and I think better when I’m doing a lot of active painting,” she said by telephone. “But I don’t try to force the relationship. I don’t write philosophy papers about painting and I don’t make highly theoretical, abstract art.”

Instead, if you visit her studio, you’ll get a solid perspective of buildings from the top down. Craig was among a group of artists who worked in the New Haven Savings Bank building, painting and sketching New Haven from above. She is also working on a commissioned series of paintings of New York City, looking out over the Museum of Natural History and the Upper West Side.

From above, she said, “you get this natural abstraction and patchwork of color… Even here in New Haven, painting from the New Haven Savings Bank gives you a sense of that—the warping of height and the way the city falls into place when you get up above it.”

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