"Model with a Gold Background" - Amy Koy
The title "Chasing The Light" may refer to the essential light reflecting from objects, defining shapes, and indicating life, captured in drawing or painting by the artists. The title could apply to photography, but in this exhibition we are demonstrating a more timeless art, the art of hand rendering a visual representation using color, shade, and line on canvas and paper.
Rooted in Ancient Greece, the tradition of drawing and painting from life has lived through centuries in the midst of other methods of art expression. Perhaps we could call it factual representation. Like journalism, what is seen is reported. The artists of this tradition do not recall from memory nor dreams, do not stylize nor exaggerate, but capture what they see.
"Pianist" - Jonathan Glass
What they see is a product of intention, their training, their mind. They intend to represent truth. Their training and practice informs use of line and shade, their mind knows that to represent they must communicate, they must use common visual language. If the artist sees rounded shapes, they must employ all their skills to force pencil, ink, paint on a flat surface to communicate roundness. They must use expressive ingenuity to capture momentary stillness in moving figures. When they see a figure, they use sophisticated editorial judgment to eliminate or deemphasize environmental details to better communicate.
The artist, the truth-teller, the re-creator expresses the subject. The relationship between the artist and subject plays a big role in the visual story and here a major difference between the two artists of our "Chasing the Light" art exhibition is constituted.
Amy Koy
Amy Koy is seeing an artist's model posing in an art studio. The model and the studio assist the artist in seeing and representing the forms. The artist has time to work, paints on prepared canvas using proper brushes and finely ground pigments in oil. Amy has all the tools, experience, and time necessary to produce full color representation of what she sees.
Jonathan Glass works outside the studio, in the world, where subjects and situations give only minimal support to the artist. He works with pencil, pen, sometimes sticks and ink on small portable pads of paper telling what truth he can of ever changing situations.
Amy absorbs the lessons and experience of thousands of past and present artists applying this knowledge to represent what she sees in the steady studio light of New York City's renowned Art Students League, one the world's premiere art institutions.
Jonathan Glass
Jonathan also, like centuries of artists before him, finds his subjects in the city life around him. The light he chases may be ceiling light of nursing homes, airports, the outdoor sun in Central Park or the variable stage light of New York City's jazz clubs. His subjects are either unaware of his sketching presence or merely temporally assenting to his representation. He works in dynamic environments never knowing if he'll have time to finish.
The two artists' work paired in "Chasing the Light" couldn't be more different within the similarity of their basic representational crafts. Amy Koy's contemplative oils are calm, confident constructions informed by her study of human anatomy and the example of past masters. Jonathan Glass' brilliant drawings are frenetic depictions from an artist necessarily absorbed by reacting to the unpredictable events of life.
These two are contemporary, New York City artists carrying forward a centuries old tradition of representational art. No camera, no computer - their art is human made, as ancient as it is modern.
Stephen Harlow and Ruth Parson
Curators