April, 2007

Orders of Magnitude
Frances Fawcett -- Jay Hart -- Margaret Nelson
April 4-29; opening reception: Friday, April 6, 5:00-8:00pm.

Orders of Magnitude: from the very large to the very tiny, and from meticulous realism to wild imaginings: cartographer Jay Hart and scientific illustrators Frances Fawcett and Margaret Nelson break loose to explore both natural and inner worlds in a three-artist show at the State of the Art Gallery.

		Frances Fawcett
Jay Hart
		Margy Nelson

About his work, Jay Hart states: "After 30 years of mapping, mostly providing spatial answers to project-level scientific query, I have shifted recently to an artistic pursuit where landform and regional pattern are rendered without annotation, as raw as can be, to allow viewers their own pace and intensity of exploration. There is much beauty to our earth's patterns which are too large for us ever to see ourselves."

"My works for this show", Frances Fawcett says,"fall into three categories: new carbon dust and charcoal drawings, new acrylic paintings, which include fairly realistic, impressionistic, and hard edge pieces, and a sampling of older work in several media. I've been experimenting extensively over the past year with different media and techniques, but the subject matter of the new work remains pretty constantly the natural world."

Margy Nelson is a neurobiologist turned scientific illustrator who also turns her fascination with form and function into art pieces, on paper and as three-dimensional fabric constructions. She adds, "This may explain the duality of my artistic interests, away from the microscope....my work cycles between the analytical and the anarchic -- and I am enjoying the trip. Whenever I can, I recycle my scientific pieces into something more "artistic," often using the computer as my drawing instrument. At times, though, it is a pleasure to escape the constaints imposed by the precise, realistic approach of scientific illustration, and to give free rein to my imagination. Watercolor has finally given me an 'out'. Watercolor paints are notoriously unpredictable in their behavior, and it delights me to let the colors play for a while on the paper, and see where the paint and my imagination take me."

  This exhibit is funded in part by a grant from the New York
State Council on the Arts Decentralization Program.