For the 24th auction later this month, a more reflective mood may prevail: While the consigned lots invariably celebrate our ties to the sea, the city's and the Island's, these connections are fraught with fear today in the aftermath of the worst storm in memory.
The 2012 auction has nearly 45 lots. Many well-regarded local contemporary artists, including Kristi Pfister, Denise Mumm and Bill Murphy have donated their own work.
As always, attendees who enjoy fine prints have an unusually broad selection to inspect. Prints represent more than tradition at the Noble Collection, a museum founded to preserve and promote the work of noted marine printmaker John A. Noble (1913-83), an artist who was born in Paris, grew up in Cape Cod and Manhattan, and lived much of his life in New Brighton.
Noble's particular specialty was wooden ships and the age of sail. He wasn't drawn to the romance of bounding main, but to the era much later, when the old vessels were sidelined, left to rot in watery "boneyards." The Island's inland waterways are ringed with these marine graveyards.Landlubbers see them as eyesores. Noble found drama, history and graphic challenges in them. (Photographers and artists tend to love them. Harper's Magazine ran a photo-essay recently on these areas; metropolitan-areas newspapers "discover" them regularly).
Three of John A. Noble's boneyard lithographs are in the 2012 auction. All depict the secret after-life of wrecks, as targets for scavengers scrounging timber, fuel and scrap metal.
BAYONNE DONATIONS
Two pieces were donated by artists who were in the museum's recent "Bayonne Bridge" exhibition. Michael Ruffo's bridge painting is a wide, dark "portrait" that resembles a drawing or even an etching, and emphasizes the graphic force of the superstructure.
The other, a woodcut by Su-Li Hung, has similar impact and intentions. It took a prize recently at the Audubon Print competition.
Paintings at this auction tend to be representational and marine, or at least watery. James McCormack's small "Kill van Kull" is a blue-on-blue evocation on the sea-lane, one of the busiest in the western hemisphere.
"July in the Battery," James Hanavan's small summer-in-the-city painting was done on the spot, a playground where kids are playing under an effervescing sprinkler. Museum staff have reportedly grown fond of this little gem.
Among the most collectible items on the block are contemporary prints by Harvey Dinnerstein ("Lois"), William Behnken, whose "Summer Crossing" is a luminous Staten Island Ferry scene.
A completely different sense of the same place is presented by photographer William Lyons in "Leaving Staten Island." Again the subject is light, as it contrasts starkly with the substance of the boat and the silhouettes of riders.
Wittily enough, Jim Lee's "East River" is 90 percent clouds. The river is barely visible, if at all.
Among many appealing photographs, Bo Kass's "Fence and Shadow" is unusual in that it isn't digital, it was produced in an old fashioned darkroom by means of the silver gelatin/chemical recipe.
It's a beautifully louvered depiction of the kind of snow fence that beach-keepers install along dunes to promote growth. It may look nostalgic this fall, now that such fences and most dunes in this part of the coast have been swept away.
There's no water to be seen in Diane Matyas's "pyrographic drawing," a wood-burned plaque although it depicts a waterfowl, a species called "Cissoid Duck."
The auction typically has an odd lot or two, a brass porthole, a block-and-tackle, something unexpected. This year, it's a handsome carved plaque ? of a pelican plucking at her own breast, a religious allegory ? rescued 60 years ago from the Randall Memorial Church.
This is the church that once stood on the Sailors' Snug Harbor campus where the Noble Museum makes its home today.
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Michael J. Fressola is the arts editor for the Advance. He may be reached at fressola@siadvance.com.
Source: http://www.silive.com/entertainment/arts/index.ssf/2012/11/post_45.html
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