Simon Liu Inc.

Products | Art Supplies | Price List | Technical Support | Order Form

"Turning / Returning"
Karen Fitzgerald, Carol Schille
November 4 - December 16, 2005
Curator: Leon Nicholas Kalas

Simon Liu gallery, with this exhibition, is presenting two dynamic and established contemporary artists; Karen Fitzgerald and Carol Schille. Their work are focused on the same effect; establishing a meditative space for viewers. Sublime luminescent washes cover the surface of their paintings. They glow and breath, creating a depth that gently enfolds and transports the viewer to a different world.

Both artists draw on Eastern spiritual traditions. Schille has traveled extensively in Tibet and China, returning from each trip with a deeper knowledge. Her work is suffused with elegant spiritual symbols including the five colors significant to Buddhist philosophy. The washes in her work recall waving g prayer flags found all over the region. Fitzgerald's work is physically round. Recalling the natural world she merges the language of landscape painting with abstract presentation.

Karen Fitzgerald

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

The experience of beauty is essentially a spiritual experience - it expands our awareness, uniting sensual, emotional, intellectual and psychic perceptions. When we experience beauty, we encounter a shift in our consciousness and the potential to link with other layers and levels of consciousness is ripe. I have always felt an extraordinary beauty in the physical world, and it is this experience that inspires me to work.

All matter has essential energy: inert rocks, ever-changing clouds, benevolent water. I work to evoke, embody and communicate this essence - the godlike absoluteness that all energy possesses. This energy is all interconnected; the process of elucidating those interconnections is where beauty is found. In the same way that the poetic form prepares a reader to consider condensed language in special ways, the circular format of my work prepares viewers for considerations of essence.

Carol Schille

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

"These work reflect my love of paint as dripping, pouring, flowing, bleeding, or brushed color. Though the look and the medium are different, I utilize gravity to get the paint on the surface of my canvas in the tradition of Morris Louis, De Kooning, and Pollock. The colors are luminous, sometimes overlapping and transparent. There are also iridescent areas which change with the light where the painting is hanging and which contrast with matte areas of color.

11 years ago, having a strong need to change the direction of my work, I went to Tibet and to other places in China so that going to Asia is now part of the painting process. Of course, the wonderful possibilities of supporting this experience at exhibitions in New York is extremely important.

In traditional Asian painting, there is a balance between aesthetic beauty and symbolic meaning. My work is abstract with an emphasis on color, but it is based on specific visual experiences and balances my background in western painting with those visual experiences and some of their symbolism.

I have a job in textiles with a company that has a factory in China. We also have suppliers and contractors there. This daily connection with modern China combined with my own research in historical China and Tibet, supports my fusion image of East/West, ancient and modern, color abstraction and reference.

I have been working on three groups of works. The Ming Paintings are based on my visits to the Forbidden City in Beijing and the Confucian monuments in Qufu in Shandong Province with their high red walls. The Prayer Flag or Lung Ta paintings have their source in the prayer flags of Nepal, Tibet, and China, and The Tashi Paintings come out of my visits to many Tibetan rug workshops in Tibet and Nepal and especially my acquaintance with a wonderful rugmaker in Kathmandu, Tashi Rapten."