Staten Island's Art Lab annual staff/faculty sale: Not just teachers, but ...

STATEN ISLAND, NY ? Viewers pretend they are selflessly shopping for gifts this time of year at the Art Lab's annual staff-and-faculty show, but often it's the opposite: They're buying for themselves.

After all, a work of art isn't socks or a bicycle or a book; it is not something you'll have for a while, use up and then toss. It's personal and long-term.

As always, this end-of-the-year-show is a not-so-subtle advertisement for courses that the Lab, a school, offers and for the instructors who teach them. The school offers a complete curriculum of beginner-to-advanced courses in the fundamental disciplines ? drawing, color theory, composition etc. ? for would-be artists of all ages.

Faculty members are making a particularly strong case for themselves as 2012 exits. For example, once viewers who are interested in pottery/ceramics get a look at Linda Butti's "For Love of Roses," it's easy to imagine them signing on.

Butti's rose bowl is a roundish, glittering vessel made in a unique, free-form, earthy/mossy style, something out of a fairy painting or a Hobbit gift shop. It's appealing and mysterious and apparently, it holds water.

In another vein entirely is Susan Roecker, a painter/printmaker advertising her mastery with a series of small crisp woodcuts, all called "Mutz," the name of her cat.

Her caught-in-the-act compositions aren't cutesy, they're restrained and expressive, like Japanese prints.

Painter Morgan Taylor's rich, dark, oil beachscapes of Davis Park on Fire Island have become historic relics in the past few weeks. We know that the superstorm hammered the wide beaches of Fire Island and many won't resemble these pictures any time soon.

Painter James Reid's beautifully done "Judgment of Paris" will always recall a 17th Century master.

History is on painter Robert Sievert's mind, too. He painted the Cadell, the lumbering old tanker that rudely breached the Clifton shoreline during the surge of the superstorm. The painting should go someday to the Staten Island Museum, of course.

Hedy Swartz wants viewers to just see how broad her art-making practice is. She's showing one of her detailed and highly finished colored-pencil still lifes (of summer flowers) next to a couple of handsome, smart assemblages that are the opposite of a floral study.

Similarly, Annette Marten wants visitors to realize the term monotype has nothing to do with monotony. Her two small prints are like little fireworks for the wall.

There's a montage of life-class drawings ? nudes ? very, very smoothly done in ink on paper by Jeanette de Rosa. You buy individual sheets, as you see fit.

Photographs are the most numerous and least expensive items. Fine small prints are like colorful windows on views that are always going to offer refreshment.

Louise Luger is framing a pink flower or a mountain wetland ("Appalachian Pond"). Nature calls to many other photographers, including Sage Reynolds, getting a good look at a swooning tree or an atmospheric lighthouse.
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? The show is up through the end of the month in the Art Lab, on the grounds of Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden,1000 Richmond Terr., Livingston. Visit ArtLab.info or call 718-447-8667 for more information or to register for classes.

Source: http://www.silive.com/entertainment/arts/index.ssf/2012/12/post_47.html

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