ENTERTAINMENT

'Out of the Studio' now at College of St. Elizabeth

PAUL BONASERA
Correspondent

MORRISTOWN – "Out of the Studio," a new exhibition celebrating the art work of the College of Saint Elizabeth's Art Program faculty members, opened Tuesday and will continue through April 12 at the Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery in the college's Annunciation Center.

Wayne Charles Roth’s “Bleed,” digital painting.

Artists reception

A reception for the artists Ellen Denuto of Denville, Barbara Neibart of Rockaway, Wayne Charles Roth of Mountain Lakes, Rocco Scary of Caldwell and Will Suarez of Jersey City will take place from 4:30 to 7 p.m. on Feb. 18.

Joey Rizzolo, a director and actor with the performance collective, "The New York Neo-Futurists," will do a site-specific performance called "The Very Definition of What If" in the gallery. Both the reception and the performance are free and open to the public, said Virginia Fabbri Butera, director and curator of the Maloney Art Gallery and chairperson of the art program.

Barbara Neibart, A Little High Culture, 2014, Ink and watercolor on paper.

Five N.J. artists featured

"We have five wonderful professional New Jersey artists, each very different from one another, teaching students this semester, and I want to celebrate their talents with the campus and the public," Butera said.

Highlights of the show include Ellen Denuto's photographic collages and her iPhone Meditations that are part of her series called, "Where Spirits Speak," Butera said.

Painter and cartoonist Barbara Neibart is showing paintings from her series "Dogs In Venice," as well as several cartoons and their preliminary sketches from another body of work entitled "Art History."

"Wayne Charles Roth has contributed four major digital paintings, which reveal his astonishing manipulation of colors and abstract forms which he hand-creates on the computer," Butera said. "The works are then printed and mounted in a variety of ways, including on frosted Plexiglas, with LED lights or on a double spherical form."

Always concerned with memory and nostalgia as underlying themes for his art, Rocco Scary, in five new pencil-on-handmade-paper drawings, studies the loneliness of suburban life by using a raised sculpting technique with his handmade paper pulp.

Will Suarez works both large and small with oil paint on canvas and paper, exploring dynamic abstract rhythms that come from interior reflections on his mind's eye, as well as from the play of light on external objects.

The work in the exhibition has been created over the last few years, some of it in the last month or two. All five faculty members are adjunct art instructors teaching various aspects of studio art.

Ellen Denuto’s “Disc 1: These Mean Streets That I Walk (Lost Girl), photographic collage on ceramic disc (by Barry Zawacki).

Ellen Denuto

Ellen Denuto, a life-long professional photographer with a studio in Denville, exhibits her work around the country and is currently teaching digital photography. Much of her work on view in the Maloney Art Gallery documents moments in the vast spaces in the Art Factory in Paterson.

Denuto explains her mission, saying "Ever present, the photographer is witness to the world's pain, beauty, justice and triumph, creating a visual journal of our time. Photographers are the keepers of memories, like it or not, and every object, place and face recalled in a photograph embodies that moment in time."

Barbara Neibart, Piazza San Marco—Dog 91, 2012, Oil on wood.

Barbara Neibart

Rockaway painter and cartoonist Barbara Neibart, daughter of the widely-known cartoonist Wally Neibart, is showing paintings from her series, Dogs In Venice, as well as several cartoons and their preliminary sketches from another body of work entitled, Arf History.

A dog lover herself, Neibart admits the fun of pairing man's best friend with great works of art history; the results are hilarious and enchanting. And don't miss her portraits pairing an English springer spaniel with Shakespeare or Queen Elizabeth II with her pooches.

This semester, Neibart is teaching "Color and Design" to both beginning and advanced students and mentoring one of the senior art majors for an internship in art teaching practices.

Wayne Charles Roth, Trance, 2014, Digital painting, 1/3.

Wayne Charles Roth

Wayne Charles Roth, from Mountain Lakes, has contributed four major digital paintings which reveal his astonishing, time-consuming creations of swirling colors and abstract forms which he hand-creates on the computer. He explains that digital painting is very much like traditional painting, except that he uses today's technology tools.

Three of the pieces in the show, titled Bleed, Trance and Badly Broken, are digital C-prints, face-mounted to an acrylic surface with aluminum backing, a contemporary way of displaying art. Roth notes that the works are archival prints said to be able to last up to 300 years. His fourth work, Deep Caress, is a new experiment for him.

He created an explosive image which has been enlarged into a 4-foot by 3-foot digital transparency with LED back lighting. Roth's largest digital paintings will be permanently installed in the lobby area of the Chambers Center For Well Being in Morristown, part of the Atlantic Health System, where visitors can study six examples of this new type of painting in relative close proximity.

A trained graphic designer who owned a design studio for 20 years in Boonton, Roth made the shift to fine art years ago. Roth is sharing his special talent with students at all levels and from all disciplines in his course called "The Digital Canvas." He says he is really enjoying the challenge and is thrilled by the talents and enthusiasm of his students.

Rocco Scary, Alive with Pleasure, 2014, Pencil on handmade paper.

Rocco Scary

Rocco Scary, a sculptor, draftsman and book artist, has been teaching at the college for four years. Writing about his recent work, he explains, "I have always been intrigued by the memory of where we have been, whom we have met, and the connections we continually make, and so I persist in examining these concepts in my new drawings on handmade paper based on photographs about small town life."

His 3-D-sculpture, also created with his handmade paper pulp, literally raises Snoopy, Charlie Brown and their friends out from a fading Charles M. Schulz comic strip. Scary continues, "I am portraying individuals, whether real or fictitious, seemingly steeped in memory, who have staked a claim to their surroundings and now are embedded within the environment itself."

Scary teaches "Book Arts" this semester, as well as the art program's new art introductory course, "Creating Art in the 21st Century." He brings his tools, supplies and talent to share with students. He exhibits his work all over the country and just recently finished a solo exhibition of his books at the Rutgers Newark Library. Scary will have another solo exhibition this summer at the Williams College Art Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Will Suarez’s “I Bring the Sun Behind Me,” oil on canvas.

Will Suarez

Will Suarez has been an evening adjunct professor at the College of St. Elizabeth for more than nine years, teaching many different subjects. This spring, he is instructing students in "Painting Processes" and is focused on oil painting, his favorite medium.

As one of the storage managers for Crozier Fine Arts, he examines, handles and cares for art of periods and happily brings this experience and knowledge of the real art world to his students.

Maloney Art Gallery

Out of the Studio marks the 28th major exhibition that Butera has curated for the Maloney Art Gallery since the fall of 2007, when the gallery and Annunciation Center opened at the college. She has also curated art exhibitions for the Geraldine R. Dodge-sponsored Gallery 14 Maple at Morris Arts, the Watchung Art Center and the New Jersey Arts Guild in Rahway.

The mission of the college art gallery is to have exhibitions of contemporary art that respond to the curricula and events on campus.

If You Go

OUT OF THE STUDIO ART EXHIBITION

WHEN: 2 -6 p.m., Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday, until April 12.

WHERE: Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery in Annunciation Center at the College of Saint Elizabeth, 2 Convent Road, Morristown

TICKETS: Free

INFO: 973-290-4314, artgallery@cse.edu or www.maloneyartgallery.org

RECEPTION: A free reception to meet the artists will take place from 4:30 to 7 p.m. on Feb. 18.