Painting, Jazz and Spoken Mind Poetry
amArtHouse opening: Robert Jessel, Albert Rivera Jazz Trio, Poet C.C. Arshagra
amArtHouse Gallery, Bantam, CT Ap. 23, 2022
Jazz Bar, Robert Jessel, 1986
At the opening of the Robert Jessel art show at amArtHouse in Bantam, CT a lively crowd gathered to see the accomplished canvases of Jessel, listen to music and hear a live improvised poetry piece tied to the occasion. Jessel commented in his opening remarks that he “is very influenced by jazz, the sense of rhythm and the improvisation.” The artist said “I think of the sound and the 1000s of hours it took these musicians to perfect a craft, that they can just feel without thinking about it. The parallels that occur in painting have to do with that discipline,” except that in art it’s “about shapes which get built in a visual sense.”
amArtHouse owner Artur Matuszewski — Jessel. Studio 54, 1982
Jessel paints with a smashing color sense and humor – be it landscapes that pop with form and perspective or cityscapes that bristle with attitude. “Jazz Bar,” spotlights a singer wrapping herself around a riff, as scattered tables with checkered tablecloths seem like musical staves. The listeners appear dotted like blue notes around the performance space. “In music it’s not the note, it’s what’s next to the note, and in painting the same,” says Jessel. In “Hydrangeas” a landscape speaking of form and angle, blue blossoms assertively stare from between wrought iron bars of a fence that features a thorny rose twining itself along the top rail, vines masquerading as a barbed wire fence. In “Washington Square Park,” soaring hybrid trees that cross Ponderosa pine with some leafy Eastern variety loom as sentinels above a tiny arch. Here, NYC is a bustling congenial place.
Washington Sq. Park, Robert Jessel, 1998
Traffic zig-zags down Fifth Avenue past the former stables turned studios where once Edward Hopper once painted. The drone’s eye view from above makes the familiar patterns of life in Greenwich Village seem like a tabletop play city, awaiting re-arrangement in the grubby fingers of a five-year-old.
Poet C.C. Arshagra with Albert Rivera Trio at amArtHouse, Ap. 23, 2022
The poet, C.C. Arshagra, specializes in a form he calls “Spoken Mind Poetry” which is created in the moment and expresses themes and responses to what is happening right there. Arshagra is tuned to an all-too-often invisible universe where soul is everything and conversations are but a ripple on the surface of consciousness. On this occasion he opened with a riff on the name of the gallery amArtHouse and proceeded to take us on a guided tour through the idea of ‘home.” Indeed, home is where the heart is, and Arshagra melted the boundaries between art and mind by suggesting that paint lives inside you, that art is heart beat and life-giving breath. Even the floor was wood that was alive in his rendering, the day after Earth Day. His eloquent break-down of distinctions between inner and outer embraced a world where you see and experience illusion and reality as a continuum. “Art is happening in your heart, it is live, it is beating your heart,” he said.
Art reminds being that it is essentially fluent, and the transparent self can be a canvas of aesthetic realms without borders. As the Albert Rivera Jazz trio improvised in the background, adding beats, ostinatos, tremolos, and sparse floating saxophone notes, Arshagra painted a picture of that moment where color became sound and sound became color. This synesthesia swept up the audience in a journey that encompassed the art on the wall, the community spirit of the gathering, and the freedom offered by the permeable self as soul experience. Truly art lives here.
Look forward to this and many more exhibits at AmArtHouse www.stevenwmiller.com art
Cheers! Loo forward to this and many more exhibits at AmArtHouse www.stevenwmiller.com