SELECTED PRESS COVERAGE
Amy Sabrin & Patricia Williams
October 17, 2024 Metro Weekly Gallery
“Summer may be in the review mirror, but you can still experience the beach at Touchstone Gallery, where two artists who take their inspiration from sandy shores are on display…The two artists have different yet complementery styles that make for the kind of perfect pairing that Touchstone is known for.”
TFA: Ashley Jaye Williams Product Line for Men
Rosemary Luckett
Rosemary Luckett Nature Icons Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, June 21, 2024
The components of Luckett’s sculptures, whether crafted or found, are diverse. Yet two motifs are common: leaves and human faces. One inspiration for this is the Yup’ik tradition of dancing while wearing masks that hide human features and honor nature spirits. The artist’s statement calls her creations “prayers of gratitude for life, and a summons to restore to the planet what humankind has taken from it.”
McCain McMurray & Tom McMurray
The gallery has smartly paired McMurray’s photographs with a collection of abstract paintings by the photographers’ brother, a D.C.-based artist and a member of Touchstone. InLa Côte d’Azur, McCain McMurray’s acrylics on canvas, usually rendered in pastel hues, call to mind the meditative arrangements of Mark Rothko, though others are washes with geometry and more mottling. A series of smaller works with creamy, heavily impastoed, highly tangible surfaces are worthy of a studied gaze.
McCain McMurray & Tom McMurray East City Art, March 29, 2024
Cookie Kerxton
Cookie Kerxton Shapes and Colors Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, March 22, 2024
Kerxton jumbles shapes as she does materials. Some of her patterns suggest windows, while others resemble Asian or African fabrics. There’s also a set of multiple pictures of target-like concentric rounds, and compositions that pit circles against lines. Among the most intriguing pieces is a painting on aluminum with partly overlapping rectangles that contain both crisp and bleary elements. Rows of dots sit below a smeary red orb, as if the sun is setting on a land of abstract forms.
figure
figure Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, February 9, 2024
In keeping with the traditions of figurative art, many of the artworks depict female nudes — but often not traditionally. Esperanza Alzona streamlines a woman’s anatomy to just a curved back, cast in shiny aluminum, while Sally Dion shapes three rounded torsos from paper, suggesting both solid bodies and gauzy clothing. In Mike Gordon’s hyperrealist pencil drawing, the only clue that the woman is submerged is the way her hair swirls above her head, floating toward the water’s surface.
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