Guy Corriero: Loves the coast but embraces the colors of San Miguel
March 23, 2007

Art exhibit Sun, Mar 25, noon–3pm Galería Atenea Jesús 2

Judging from the paintings that make up this show, it seems clear that Guy Corriero’s work is a continual evolution of both subject matter and medium. The work ranges from wide vistas in and around San Miguel to portraits and intimate café scenes. Along with his ability to move effortlessly from one subject to another he moves with equal agility from oil to watercolors and back again. “Each medium has its own intrinsic beauty,” he explains. “I love the tactile feel and application of oils as well as the ability to obtain color vibration by applying one color over another. Watercolor encourages a more spontaneous and fluid approach to the subject. It is quite unforgiving but that is part of its charm.”

Originally from Brooklyn, his formative years were spent in Long Beach, NY. Corriero reminisced, “I loved living near the ocean. I remember hearing the waves breaking from my bedroom window on cool summer evenings. Fishing and life-guarding along the ocean left an indelible impression on me.” He and his wife, Sharon, met on the sands of Long Beach 45 years ago, and have recently moved to Portland, Maine so as to be close to the ocean once again. “I love painting the sea in both its calm and fury,” he said. This year marks the 37th consecutive sea painting class on Monhegan Island, fifteen miles off the coast of Maine.

Corriero attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City and then obtained a Bachelor of Arts Degree from C.W. Post College where he studied painting with Jules Olitsky and sculpture with Pierre Bourdelle. After graduation he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps where he was eventually assigned to The Marine Corps Gazette as an illustrator. “The practical skills of drawing, painting and designing to meet deadlines were invaluable as it launched my career as a commercial artist upon my discharge.” While working for various art studios and agencies in New York City he attended The Art Students League, studying watercolors with Mario Cooper and drawing and painting with John Groth and Earl Mayhan.

“Teaching a figure drawing class in the evenings at The State University in Farmingdale, NY was such an enjoyable experience I decided to make teaching art on the college level the career for me.”

After earning a Masters Degree in Humanities from Hofstra University, the Corrieros moved to Ilion, NY where he helped to establish the Fine Arts Program at Herkimer County Community College: “I designed and taught every course in the Fine Arts curriculum from art history to photography, usually having more homework than my students.” A few years before retiring he was awarded the New York State Chancellors Award for Excellence in Teaching. Guy’s educational career includes 16 instructional videos on drawing, painting and sculpting in various media produced by Educational Videos of Hunstsville, Texas.

“We came to San Miguel five years ago and as you can see from my work I love painting the people and places of San Miguel. There is a new subject at every turn and of course, there are the colors, always the colors,” he says with excitement.

Corriero is a signature member of The American Watercolor Society, where one of his watercolors can be seen in this year’s juried annual A.W.S. Exhibit at the Salmagundi Club in New York City.

Corriero will donate 100 percent of all sales to Feed the Hungry, a San Miguel de Allende organization that provides hot, nutritious meals to over 3,000 hungry young children every school day.

Art auction for the Centro de Crecimiento
By Margaret Failoni

Art benefit auction for the Centro de Crecimiento Fri, Mar 23, 5pm Hotel Real de Minas Ancha de San Antonio

The generosity of the San Miguel art community is continually felt by many local charities. Fundraising events often have come to the aid, of many, especially young children with handicaps. The Centro de Crecimiento has been working over the years to help integrate children, from as young as two years of age, into the community by paying special attention to them in the form of physiotherapy, sensorial psychology help, language therapy and so on. This opportunity for a better life is not only offered to San Miguel children, but also to those in surrounding and outlying towns and colonias. 

The children are also fed daily meals, as the majority of them come from very low-income families. This work is incredibly important, but cannot be done without funds.

The amazing generosity of art donors helps to make this effort viable. Some truly collectable work is included in an upcoming auction to benefit the Centro de Crecimiento, from Thomas LeNoir’s fabulous amber jewelry to Genny Claro’s Bodegon, from hand-painted ceramics by Danisha to Victor Cuevas de la Mora’s dancing figures, just to name a few. The list of donors reads like a “Who’s Who” of the art and design world: Artists include Ana Thiel, Antonio Vega, Barbara Lapham, Britt Zaist, Keith Keller, Lothar Müller, Mai Ono Kestenbaum, Marion Perlet, Mary Rapp, Merry Calderoni, Linda Vanderver, Saul Newman and Siobhan O’Donaghue to name just a few, plus wonderful objects by Manuel Chacon, DeWayne Youts, Galeria Zócalo, Judith Roberts, Irene de Leon, Jan Toorchen, Darla Jewelry, David Silver, Silvia Samuelson Gallery, Casa Y Campo. The Real de Minas Hotel is giving their space, and La Europea is donating the liquor. The restaurants association is responsible for the hors d’oeuvres. All told, this a a most generou
s action by the people of San Miguel.

It is now up to the San Miguel public, which has always proven to be generous in the past, to make this a successful occasion.

The silent auction starts at 6pm and the live auction starts at 8pm. There is an open bar accompanied by tapas and live music. The art work will be on view for the public from 5pm onwards.

Harriet Ballard’s Amorphous Configurations
By Patricia Zinsmeister Parker

Works by Harriet Ballard Wed, Mar 28, 6–8pm Mariposa Gallery Recreo 36

Harriet Moore Ballard’s new paintings illustrate a continuing process of exploration, in which seminal ideas have been synthesized into a more playful and spontaneous language. Random shapes, marks, grids, words, and numbers interact in free form association. Lines and shapes are drawn, erased, and then overpainted and layered, resulting in amorphous configurations.

Influences on Ballard’s work are Ben Nicholson, Matisse, Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns, and in terms of the process, Basquiat. Mexican painters, especially those whose work is evocative of ancient civilizations, continue to fascinate Ballard and infuse her work.

She views these new paintings as her most gratifying because the paintings are done quickly, leaving no time for self criticism. The colors, sometimes straight from the tube, have evolved from her earlier more deliberate and modulated palette.

Ballard’s inspiration derives from life, from nature, and all things that filter through her consciousness. She comments that the many component parts of her life such as her domestic home life, her maintenance responsibilities, and her experiences and ideas, all make their way into her paintings. Organizing these ephemeral thoughts on the canvas brings an integration to her life, Ballard says.

Her time in Mexico, and the environment that she has created for herself are manifest in this recent body of work at the Mariposa Gallery.

Ballard has a BA in Political Science from Chatham College in Pittsburgh, a BFA in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and an MFA from the Instituto de Allende in San Miguel (affiliated with the University of Guanajuato). In addition, she studied at the Arts Students League in New York City. Presently, she has studios in Cleveland, Ohio (in an abandoned elevator factory), and in San Miguel.

Patricia Zinsmeister Parker is a retired adjunct professor in the school of art at the University of Akron.

Grace Kary: Contained

Photography opening Works by Grace Kary Fri, Mar 30, 7pm YAM Gallery Instituto Allende Ancha de San Antonio

Grace Kary’s Polaroid to digital work explores the expanded psychological landscapes we inhabit. Kary works in various dated technologies, such as the instant camera. She prefers the results of using Polaroid film to digital for what she wants to achieve. Certainly the hyper-saturated colors, shallow picture plane, high contrast and pliable emulsion of the exposures render surreal environments, which appear as interpretations of the hermetic mythos she traverses.

Although Kary often photographs simple objects such as the porcelain insulators used in the series “Contained,” the results are haunting. The sense of a psychological landscape is evident as a certain dissolution between the internal and external color exists throughout all the series, ensuring that the photos appear mythic as much as psychologically infused.

A graduate of Ryerson’s media arts program in Toronto in the ‘90s, Kary went on to win the prestigious Hunter Award for media arts in Canada in 1996. Since then she has been singled out by Polaroid for sponsorship and is represented in their permanent collection. Kary has garnered many awards and grants in Canada from civic to national. 

In “Genesis,” Kary set out to capture the seven days of creation in seven discreet exposures. “I had been revisiting the Book of Genesis and meditating on its symbolism and what each day meant in the context of contemporary society. I mean the old-fashioned fire and brimstone religious interpretations have gone through so many permutations from Positivism through Freud and then, let’s face it, with the resurgence of fundamentalism, full circle back to the fire and brimstone, and it becomes increasingly muddy. I took it upon myself to play creator and decimated a sculpture I had made years before. Then I re-photographed shadows and light in the sculpture because it was so much of what Genesis came to mean for me: the cycle of creation and destruction. It was incredible taking a hammer to it—something I had created—and then grabbing my camera. Everything from the face of God to creatures upon the earth developed out of that experiment. I just witnessed it in awe. I mean this is going back to the fact that we ar
e now somewhere in the beginning of the 21st century and I can barely cogitate on the state of affairs at the inception of time, which manifests using analog technology. To me this is completely fascinating and something I cannot explore in digital. Companies such as Kodak and Polaroid are starting to phase out these wonderful films like SX-70 and super 8 and 16 mm and it is limiting your choices now as an artist. They have a certain quality, which echoes something deeper, which I am sad will no longer be represented in photo-based work. I know there are many artists who feel this way.”

“I chose to show with YAM because they are one of the galleries trying to push the envelope in San Miguel and I try to do that in my work. I have a show in Canada this summer, which is a collaborative installation piece between myself and electro-acoustic composer Jascha Narveson, which took several years to develop and we are exploring similar territory but with a particular look at Freud’s theory of transference and how it relates to the relationship between image and sound. I hope to bring this exhibit to Mexico next year.”

Consummate artist’s magic world
By Margaret Failoni

Works by Peter Leventhal
Fri, Mar 30, 7pm
LeNoir Gallery
Jesús 2A 
Cocktails

It’s been difficult to catch Peter Leventhal these days, what with preparing an exhibition of recent works while traveling back and forth to Mexico City. Leventhal has been invited to create a special project sponsored by Turner Editions and Conaculta. He’s loathe to go into detail, but it has something to do with an in depth study through imagery of Mexican historic figures, both political as well as the intelligentsia in general: authors, philosophers, scientists, artists and the figureheads of Mexican democracy. Well worth waiting for.

Peter Leventhal was born in New York City, in 1939, and was part of that postwar buzz of the early ‘50s when the city was bursting with artistic ferment. With a degree in philosophy from Columbia University, the artist could not quite decide what to do with his life. His father was a noted textile designer in New York and Leventhal grew up surrounded by creativity. His father even tried to show him the ropes of design but soon concluded the experiment would turn out to be a fiasco. So the self-taught Leventhal slowly drifted into the world of pure art. He experimented with drawing techniques, and this art became his first achievement. Meanwhile, in order to earn some kind of living and learn more about painting, he became an assistant to several of the artists rising in the field at that time in New York: Jules Olitzky, Milton Reznek and William DeKooning were but a few.

During this period, Leventhal would sneak into the New York Public Library; they had a section where young artists could actually examine original drawings by such masters as Dürer, Raphael, etc. He would sit for hours examining these drawings and copying them. They were his true drawing education.

Stubbornly insisting on earning a living in art, and taking advantage of his superb drawing skills, Leventhal started to teach and soon became the head of the Art Department in the very renowned school for gifted children, the Saint Ann School which, for over 20 years, was voted the best secondary school for gifted children.

His first public exhibition was a drawing show in the Drawing Shop Gallery followed by an exhibition in the Printmaking Work Shop, both in Greenwich Village. Along with Robert Blackburn, Leventhal taught master classes in printmaking in that venue.

The artist’s first trip to Europe was in 1960. Everything was happening in New York at that time, while Paris was slow. All the more reason for him to go to Paris, to reflect and ponder where he was and where he wanted to go. He lived in Paris for a little over two years before returning to New York. While in Paris he had two shows: one at the Galerie Laurence on Rue de Seine and the other at the renowned Galerie Du Dragon, along with the artist Robert Thompson.

He started traveling in the United States visiting New Mexico and Maine as well as making several trips to Puerto Vallarta beginning in 1978, and staying there two or three months at a time. His first visit to San Miguel de Allende was in 1990 and he confessed he didn’t much like it at the time. Something about the surrounding mountains…yet, he was compelled to keep coming back. His love of the sea took him to Florida where he lived for another four years—Jacksonville, Sarasota, Boca Raton, St. Augustine—but fed up with living in the States, he moved all his stuff, lock, stock and barrel to San Miguel in 2001.

When pressed for more information, Leventhal admits he’s always been a figurative painter. The abstract movement of his early years never held any attraction for him. Drawing was his first love, slowly moving into painting. He would do portraits of friends in an environmental setting such as parks or a room filled with objects. Even before he had ever heard of Pop Art, his backgrounds included pop icons such as food cans or food boxes. This was 1957/58, an exciting time, the start of painting. This period was soon followed by a more decorative mode, heavily influenced by Matisse. Paintings of wrestlers followed. How curious that so many painters have gone through the ‘wrestlers’ stage. More meticulously painted portraits followed in huge formats, twice the size of the actual figure.

It was during this period that acrylic paint came on the scene. It had been previously used to paint a liquid base onto the canvas. Now, the acrylic paint pioneers, Rohn and Haas, were offering artists free paints so that they could experiment with this new product. Leventhal started to use this new material with old master technique, layering the canvas with each new color to form a desired color tone or depth. The resulting work was very realist if somewhat stylized, similar to the work of the Italian painter Anigoni. Some works from this period were shown at the Roko Gallery and the Brata Gallery, both in Greenwich Village, which was still the center of the art world in New York. However, the artist soon reverted back to oil painting executed on smooth gesso surfaces, always with the master techniques of layering. The layering and the light techniques made the work appear more dimensional, more sculptural. It was not long after that Leventhal was tempted into sculpture.

In 1970, Leventhal experimented first with stone, modeling with clay and finally his chosen preference, wood. He had met a young, gifted black artist, Laurence Faust, who taught him the rudiments of wood carving and who became a close friend and a determining influence on his work.

Leventhal’s painting started to show light veils of eroticism around 1975/76. His painting technique was looser, more post impressionist in feeling. He started to make paintings with multiple figures, figures on a bed, more allegoric, mythologic and always more narrative: a very tricky balance between painting and illustration. Over time they evolved in different directions. This was thanks to the wonderful experience of carefully examining the works of the great Venetians, such as Titian, Tintoretto and Giacomo Pisano for composition, examining more and more Baroque art which at that time was disdained.

To carefully examine and admire Leventhal’s work, one cannot fail to notice the tongue-in-cheek eroticism that permeates his oeuvre. But then, all the masters of the 20th century and past, approached eroticism in their later years. Picasso’s greatest etchings were pure erotica, all created in the last 15 years of his life. Given the prolificacy of both Picasso and Leventhal’s sentimental success, one can only determine it must come from a lifetime of successful practice and therefore, they know what they are painting about.

Among the works to be shown at the LeNoir Gallery, a small selection of paintings are accompanied by some of Leventhal’s exquisite sculptures. This is the first time the sculptures have even been exhibited in San Miguel. As much as the artist’s superb drawing and painting techniques are to be admired, his sculptures are small masterpieces. Most definitely a show not to be missed.

“Spring Art Stroll” from Umarán along Zacateros 
By Hedy Parks

Art walk Tues, Mar 27, 6–8pm From the Parroquia to Zacateros Free

In celebration of the refreshing season of spring, six galleries on and near Zacateros join in keeping their doors open a little later and offering refreshments on March 27. This is a perfect opportunity for you to get to know the artists and see some of their new work.

Strolling from the Parroquia two blocks down the right side of Umarán, you find Ave Maria Gallery, run by local designer Giovanna Canela. Opened in July 2006, this studio-gallery features her exclusive designs and unique pieces of furniture, nichos, crosses, candles, jewelry and more. Check out the huge heart sculpture at the entrance, and her modern take on the Corazon Sagrada (Sacred Heart) incorporated into sculpted furniture, Mexican Lotería (bingo) design pillows and other folk-art images made contemporary. Ave Maria is also a studio-gallery where artist Walter Wenzel offers painting classes upstairs for all ages and levels of experience. Wenzel has participated in various shows on both national and international levels. His work incorporates religious imagery and still-lifes done in beautiful detail.

Across the street, on Umarán 32, is Magenta Art Cooperative which celebrates its second year with a spring cleaning sale. Magenta is a group of several artists/owners who are creating an unusual environment of art, in various forms; paintings, ceramics, glasswork, jewelry, dolls, and handmade clothing. All artists are giving discounts on their work. Victoria Pierce offers her paintings, Bonnie Griffith her collaged clothing, Rosa Torres her whimsical ceramics, and Rebecca Peterson her colourful nichos. For more information, call Magenta at 154-9587.

Around the corner is Casa Grau on Zacateros 19, which is also delighted to participate in this event. Half a block down on Zacateros 24 is Mero Arte, where you’ll find contemporary art and jewelry. Mero’s objective is to promote the work of artists with a unique personal vision, firm in the belief that originality and beauty are the most important elements of creative expression. Michelle Wey’s fine jewelry is contemporary, with design elements based on nature and reflecting her interest in Eastern philosophy. The look is clean and elegant and often combines silver and gold with sapphires or semiprecious stones such as amethysts or locally quarried opals. She can make custom designs, including wedding bands.

One block down from Mero, JADE features objets of fine art, Mexican crafts and curious little items from around the world. You may want to bring home some of their exclusive Mayan handwoven textiles from Guatemala and Chiapas or get some jewelry in sterling silver with precious and semiprecious stones.

The recently reopened Estudio 46, one block down on Zacateros 46, invites you to get to know both their new and their established artists and see their exciting work. Hedy Parks, a studio jeweller, with a background in architecture and a former student of Billy King, recently joined Estudio 46. Her work reflects her love of modern design and is inspired by her surroundings and the materials she works with. Her jewelry is made of sterling silver; some pieces include copper accents, mokume gane, and other beautiful Mexican jaspers or opals.

Estudio 46 owner Lisa Simms is hosting a benefit together with Bill Menge and Mary Quagliata. The three artists contribute part of the proceeds from their sales. Lisa presents hand puppets and new wearable sculpture pieces, plus funky organic chains. Lisa’s sculptural pieces, always influenced by her tales of the world at large, include “The Mystical Dreams of the Tiger King,” “The Playmates of Princess Natalia of Xochimilco” and “That Is Not A Crab, That Is Not In My Room.” Her pieces incorporate diverse materials such as ocean rocks, Vietnamese scrimshaw plaques, black pearls, plastic, silver and gold. Bill presents his small collages, and Mary her inspiring paintings. 

Keith Keller shows new oils, including “Enrique’s Hopeless Love,” and small paintings from the “Screaming Women” series.