UN/RELATED: Christine Hughes, Kate Berry Brown, Lisa Ivory: In-Person and Online

CHRISTINE HUGHES was born in 1955. Her career was seeded in Detroit, where she was influenced by the artists of the Cass Corridor. After receiving her BFA from Wayne State University in 1981 she moved to New York City. She maintained a studio on Canal Street in Chinatown until she moved to the Hudson Valley in 2002.

The artist refers to her small paintings as “physical abstractions” and “slow-moving, anti-heroic studies” that started materializing during the COVID-19 lockdown. They are iconic in their central imagery, intimate in scale, reductive in their simplicity, and often both humorous and anxious. The forms in these paintings are familiar to the viewer, to some degree or another, but abstracted from thingness, more evocative than actual. Some forms are contradictory to each other, space flattened out. The artist focuses on the balance of the composition and the tension between the hand-painted lines she loves and the tight abstraction she tries to avoid. 

“I begin each painting on a solid enamel ground. From there I mix a color and paint a form and the painting seems to progress on it’s own. Over the past several years as the work evolved it became more symmetrical and more formal. I’ve painted exclusively with enamel for many years. It is a challenging medium to work with. The way I work the paint, it has to be built up in layers. It’s fluid until it’s half dry, then the surface becomes gummy. The colors change to at least a shade darker as they dry. But the surface is so beautiful and this paint dries overnight so I can work on a painting every day.”

Hughes has shown prolifically in both New York and Detroit, including exhibitions at The Drawing Center (NYC), Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, The Samuel Dorsky Museum (New Paltz, NY), The Millay Colony (Austerlitz, NY), The Willis Gallery and Alley Culture in Detroit. She has had one person shows at John Davis Gallery (Hudson, NY), Art101 (Brooklyn, NY), and The Foundation Gallery (Hudson, NY).

Hughes received the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2022.

KATE BERRY BROWN was born in 1978 and grew up just outside of Chicago in Evanston, Illinois, where she lives with her husband and three children. 

Brown attended Washington University Art School, where she earned her BFA in fashion design. A few years later, her curiosity led her to the Netherlands, where she spent six months getting a master’s degree in floral design at Boerma Instituut. While there, she and her bulldog lived in a trailer she rented from a dairy farmer.  

Years later, married, living in Las Vegas and pregnant with her first child, Brown settled back into the fine art of painting. Over the years, through the move back to the Midwest and two more kids, drawing replaced painting out of both practicality as well as a deep love for immediate and meditative mark-making. 

Brown’s current body of work consists of meticulously carved wood and paper sculptures, which evolved from abstract ink drawings on cut paper and the desire to give them dimensionality. The artist's woodworking journey began three and a half years ago on a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts called Cuttyhunk, where she moved for several months to escape the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My wood and paper wall sculptures are tokens of fragility and strength, symbols of impermanent but infinite beauty,” says the artist. “I sketch out shapes and loose ideas in my sketchbook, on napkins, on brochures.  But I only use my sketch as a guide, because once I cut the wood, the piece takes on a world of its own. I sand, I cut, I glue, and repeat, making changes as I go. I let the design go where it wants, where it feels right.  And most importantly I edit ruthlessly, reducing all excess so that no lines, cuts, or marks are extraneous. Often, I find myself surprised by how each piece turns out.  Tumbled and sculpted, sort of like a gift from the sea.”

LISA IVORY was born in London in 1966. She grew up in the city’s East End, where the urban landscape has a wild edge. Ivory attended Central Saint Martins School of Art and graduated with a B.A. (Hons) in Fine Art - Painting. Alongside painting and drawing, her practice has evolved to include collage, making objects, and printmaking. Ivory vacillates between painting on gessoed panels, where the paint coagulates in a sensuous smear, and on linen—where it scumbles and softens into the grain.

In our post-Enlightenment age, most have become skeptical of the medieval bestiary, relegating its hybrid creatures to the toy box of childhood. Ivory, however, navigates these shadowlands of the imagination, mining them for inspiration. She invites us to become innocent voyeurs; to tiptoe through crepuscular layers of oil paint and glimpse the moment when a naked beauty tames the beast. In Ivory’s shadowy layers the hard edges dissolve, allowing a sense of gentle mystery to emerge. Unlike the woods of her East London childhood, tainted by human detritus, these spaces are suffused with the innocent wonder of a child who has not yet learned to fear the natural world.

“As a child, I wanted to grow up to be an animal,” says the artist. “My work attempts to connect my creature self with my human self—to be ‘hairy on the inside,’ as Angela Carter wrote. I am interested in the odd, the liminal, the ambiguous.”

The beasts and monsters that are recurrent motifs in Ivory’s work are metaphors for those magical beings that we sometimes imagine lurking at our feet, under our bed at night, or sitting on our shoulder, scaring off enemies. “Like some sort of protector you would see gurning outside of church buildings,” she says.

Ivory’s work is a bestiary that describes everyman’s woes—their trials and travails, flailing and failures. A wild man, a savage woman, a feral child… they all represent the anti-hero, the plight of the outsider, but also something very deep within us.