Walking Not Talking (Nature as Muse)

Kenise Barnes Fine Art is thrilled to announce our midsummer exhibition focused on three artists whose keen observation and connection to the natural world invites us to pause and appreciate.

Margot Glass focuses primarily on drawing, using various traditional methods and materials as a foundation for her work, including traditional silverpoint and 14k goldpoint, homemade organic inks and oil and acrylic painting with mixed mica using fine point crow quill pens in place of brushes.

Glass is inspired by the tradition of idealizing nature in art and design as ornament across cultures while seeking to observe and represent her subjects as accurately as possible in all their irregularity and imperfection.

Central to her work is the exploration of ephemeral, fragile subjects, focusing primarily on weeds or ‘waste plants’, and other plants generally considered to be undesirable, to recognize their beauty in all their imperfection and asymmetry. Her focus on these marginal plants is guided by the question of what we value, what we consider ‘belonging’ to mean, and to highlight the beauty of what is present in the disrupted landscape that we find ourselves in today.

Margot Glass grew up in New York City, and studied art at The Art Students' League, Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Fashion Institute of Technology. Glass’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council STARS Artist Residency; Lost and Found Lab Artist-in-Residence and an Oak Spring Garden Foundation Interdisciplinary Fellowship. Her work is in private and public collections including the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon, PA, Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, VA, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, MA, Hotel Del Coronado Collection, CA, Allentown Art Museum, PA, Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, IN, the Beth Rudin deWoody Collection, among others. She currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts.

Richard Klein has been copper plating organic objects for over three decades utilizing found objects that are intrinsically fragile and impermanent. The process allows Klein to encase natural objects in a thin coating of metallic copper, permanently preserving them. The alchemical transformation being both practical and poetic. 

In his most recent work, the artist juxtaposes electroplated natural findings with photo gravures of urban landscapes addressing our relationship with nature simultaneously reminding us that we are nature and that our detachment from nature is the source of much of the destruction to our planet. In particular, the artist’s interest in both fungi and copper hint at the convergence of natural and technological evolution: fungi, through their mycelium, connect virtually all terrestrial plant life, acting as natural communication networks; while copper is the material that the human-made electrical and digital networks depend on. 

Richard Klein is the former exhibitions director of The Aldrich of Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. His work has been shown widely in US and is in the public collections of Norton Family Collection, Santa Monica, CA, De Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, Connecticut Artists Collection, Hartford, CT and has been featured in The New Criterion, Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, Art Forum, The Brooklyn Rail and Art New England to name a few. The artist lives and works in CT.

Francis Sills’s work is grounded in the perceptual-based, realist tradition. The artist works directly from observation in nature. In dealing with the intricacies and challenges of working from observation and the sustained experience of intense, visual scrutiny, the artist comes to understand and know his world. The flora series is an ongoing group of paintings utilizing the flowers and plants from the artist’s home garden. Sills recently been adding various shaped mirrors to the set ups, which both multiply the forms and fracture the space. Sills’ paintings are dense and subtle, revealing specific nuances of color, light, and form. Often, the underlying geometry and architecture of the composition are apparent in the application of paint, the artist’s analytic thinking about structure and his methodology still evident in the finished work.

Sills’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, has been featured in publications such as Wall Street International Magazine, American Art Collector, The New York Times, I Like Your Work Podcast, and can be found in The Fine Art Program and Collection at Montefiore Einstein, New York, NY. Francis Sills earned his MFA at Parsons School of Design, New York, NY and BFA at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. The artist lives and works in South Carolina.

Please contact Lani Holloway, Associate Director, Lani@kbfa.com, 860 560 3085 with inquires or to arrange a preview of the exhibition.