Past Show • September 5-28, 2019

STORIES AND VOICES: ALL OF WHAT IS POSSIBLE
​Ron Maggio and Rochelle Shicoff

Opening / Amherst Arts Night Plus: First Thursday, September 5, 5-8:00 pm
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Forum / Artists In Community: Thursday, September 19, 7:30 pm
Shicoff and Maggio have invited community writers and poets to read and discuss their work. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.  Free and open to the public.

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 Stories and Voices: All of What is Possible at Gallery A3

Stories and Voices: All of What is Possible features new work by Rochelle Shicoff and Ron Maggio. Shicoff’s latest painting series, Voices from Far Lands, invites viewers into an intimate world where goats represent sensuality and determination, Red-winged Blackbirds suggest freedom and playfulness, and human figures evoke vulnerability, endurance, and fear. Maggio’s new mixed-media series, Stories, employs an illegible, enigmatic line that communicates the many aspects of our lives, creating opportunities for viewers to participate in formulating or completing the “Untold Story”. 

For an Artists in Community Forum on September 19, in Gallery A3 at 7:30 pm, Shicoff and Maggio have invited community writers and poets to read and discuss their work. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.

Rochelle Shicoff: Voices from Far Lands
Ever since she drew the fish in her family fish tank at age six, Rochelle Shicoff has made pictures. While two of her recent series of paintings were inspired by world situations--After All the Leaves Have Fallen: Muslim Women and Their Traditions and The Stories Inside: Palestinian Women Challenging Israeli Soldiers—her most recent work goes deep into her own personal world. Voices from Far Lands allowed her the freedom to conjure up an imaginary world of humans, animals, birds, and foliage using an admixture of paint and collage elements.  “This work is driven by a deep and long standing affection for nature and I have used birds and foliage throughout each painting,” she explains. “The small floating collage shapes can be seen as thoughts that come unexpectedly into one's mind, which often happens in my case.” While initial response may be to the beauty of the colors, the human figure in each painting allows viewers to identify with the emotions that the artist explores.
 
Ron Maggio: Stories
Ron Maggio’s sixteen mixed-media paintings are multi-layered, utilizing oil pastel, graphite, colored pencil, and acrylics to create opportunities for viewers to participate in formulating or completing an “Untold Story”. Maggio’s Stories are shaped by a series that he did several years ago, entitled Arias, which was inspired by Italian Lyric Opera and attempted to communicate the beauty of musical arias in abstract visual terms. As Maggio explains, “I went to the elements of design and utilized some of the same sensibilities found in Music: Color, Line, Tonality, and Repetition. Line became voice: light, thin line for the Soprano and Tenor; and dark, heavier line for the Baritone and Bass.” Each painting is twelve inches square, intentionally intimate in scale and small in size, to draw the viewer into the work. In his creation of abstract narratives, Maggio cites the influence of Cy Twombly, and notes the undergirding inspiration of “Automatism,” a process of writing unidentifiable language or words often used by the Surrealists.

Images:
Untold Story #13, mixed-media on panel, Ron Maggio (top)
It is the Promise, detail, paint and collage, Rochelle Shicoff (bottom)