SELECTED PRESS COVERAGE
Sanah Brown-Bowers
Sanah Brown-Bowers: Bloodlines, East City Art, December 4, 2023
Sanah Brown-Bowers Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, December 29, 2023
Not all of Brown-Bowers’s artworks incorporate 3D objects. “Just Breathe,” a painting of the artist’s mother during her final days, is simpler but no less suffused with familial emotion. The feelings Brown-Bowers has for her culture and upbringing are channeled here into a portrait of a single, shining, beloved face.
Rosa Vera & Elaine Florimonte
Elaine Florimonte- Lost & Found, East City Art, October 30, 2023
Elaine Florimonte Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, November 24, 2023
Literally as well as figuratively layered, Elaine Florimonte's abstracted landscapes are built like the Earth itself: bit by bit, but with epic results. The pictures in her Touchstone Gallery show, “Lost and Found,” have a sense of both immediate movement and long-term action.
Dana Brotman & Debra Perkins
unleaving Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, October 30, 2023
Brotman’s recent paintings have a historical vibe that is palpable even without noticing that one of them is titled “Rosie, Winter 1924” or learning that the show’s title derives from Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The oblong faces and elongated necks recall Aubrey Beardsley’s 1890s illustrations and the art nouveau style they helped inspire.
Tory Cowles
People and The Planet
Things to Do: Opening Reception, District Fray, August 5, 2023
Beat the Heat by Visiting These 9 Local Exhibitions, District Fray, August 13, 2023
July Exhibitions
Persian Perspectives
Marcia Coppel & Jill Brantley
Mary D. Ott & Rosemary Luckett
Sharon Malley
The Wind We Cannot See East City Art, March 1, 2023
In her first solo exhibition at Touchstone Gallery, Sharon Malley presents paintings that evoke her deep reverence
for and connection to the forces of nature, manifested in movements of air. The Wind We Cannot See features 19 paintings and mixed media pieces created with oil, collage, and cold wax.
SEQUENCE
Patricia Williams
Some Thoughts About Trees Mark Jenkins, Washington Post Jan 1, 2023
The dominant color of Williams’s tree-oriented show, at Touchstone Gallery, is not green but a soft, lush blue. This frames the silhouetted branches and other details in many of the rural Virginia artist’s pictures, most of which are watercolors painted on clayboard and sealed with varnish. The arboreal forms are generally lighter than their sky-like backdrops, but loosely patterned with spots and lines in bold green, orange and red.
Paula Lantz
On a Romp Matt Byrne, District Fray Magazine, Nov 15, 2022
Collecting work produced during the heavy early days of the pandemic, Lantz’s new pieces are intuitive and bold, inspired by the news podcasts that soundtracked her work during this time. Rather than the background music typical to her process, the constant stream of words and information influenced these layered, textural forms, resulting in visceral, complicated images.
Claudia Samper
Dreams Mark Jenkins, Washington Post Oct 20, 2022
The dream imagery is less diverse, if no less vivid, in Claudia Samper’s Touchstone Gallery show. “Dreams” comprises a series of half-abstract paintings that include a few legible elements: renderings of birds, birdhouses, furniture and the scrawled word “home.” Most also have simple renderings of windows, which may represent domesticity or the portals through which housebound people perceive the wilder world beyond.
Steve Wanna
Transparent to Transcendence Mark Jenkins, Washington Post Sept 9, 2022
The artworks in Steve Wanna’s Touchstone Gallery show, “Transparent to Transcendence,” are miniature big-bangs. Inspired by images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the pictures are abstract space-scapes made by smashing plaster shells filled with liquid and powdered pigments atop panels painted in a single hue.
Jenny Wu & Jenny Singleton
Do it Anyway & 👀🎨🏜 Mark Jenkins, Washington Post July 22, 2022
Such gestures may be derived from calligraphy, but they also hint at a world written by forces more powerful than a pen or brush. Also at Touchstone is a show, titled with emoji for eyes, easel and picture, of sculptural paintings by Jenny Wu. The D.C. artist, who exhibits her work frequently, begins by layering multiple coatings of latex paint; when the fields are dry, she cuts them into small shards and arranges them in geometric patterns.
Makda Kibour
Tribes; Mark Jenkins, Washington Post June 17, 2022
Kibour is a Virginian who was born in Addis Ababa, far north of the Omo Valley. Inspired by travels in her ancestral homeland, the artist made semiabstract, mixed-media pictures of members of the Surma and Mursi tribes. The palettes of these strongly vertical renderings, often of small groups of people, are characterized by dark reds.
Sonya Michel
Seeing My Way; Hannah Docter-Loeb, Washington City Paper March 28, 2022
Since retiring, the well-known U.S. historian of women and social policy Sonya Michel has returned to another passion: abstract art. This April, her work will be on display at the Touchstone Gallery marking her first solo exhibition, Seeing My Way. According to Michel, the title has two meanings.
Susi Cora and Gale Waller
Susi Cora: Chesapeake and Gale Waller: Mass - Balance - Space; Mark Jenkins, Washington Post February 18, 2022