Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard
Link copied to clipboard

Moore benefactor shows her work

Beach paintings are a highlight.

"Second Sight" is among Rochelle Levy's paintings in the exhibition "From My Point of View" at Moore College of Art & Design. Her fascination with beaches stems from childhood stays at Margate.
"Second Sight" is among Rochelle Levy's paintings in the exhibition "From My Point of View" at Moore College of Art & Design. Her fascination with beaches stems from childhood stays at Margate.Read more

'From My Point of View" at Moore College of Art & Design offers an intimate career trace of Rochelle Levy, one of the complex personalities who have been a vital part of the nation's first and only women's art college. Brought into sharper focus by this show of Levy's own work is the often-overlooked fact that the Galleries at Moore have provided decades of exhibiting opportunities to artists under the Rochelle F. Levy Director and Chief Curator, a position established through Levy's generosity about 20 years ago.

Levy's current painting show suggests that the spirit animating her own artwork is the same as the one directing her philanthropy. I believe the two most outstanding exhibition achievements by Levy director/chief curator Lorie Mertes, who left Moore earlier this year, were "Alice Neel: Drawing From Life" and this Rochelle Levy solo. We can look for lofty new professional goals to be pursued with the arrival later this month of new Galleries at Moore director Kaytie Johnson, formerly director/curator of DePauw University's galleries, museums and collections.

Although Rochelle "Cissie" Levy earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at Moore in 1979 and an honorary degree there in '98, she'd been a student at Barnard College and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts decades earlier. Five children occupied the years between the first and second educational experiences; it took her more than a decade to graduate from Moore.

This exhibition is highlighted by Levy's life-long fascination with ocean beaches, stemming from time in her childhood spent at Margate on the Jersey Shore. (She now lives and paints in Bryn Mawr and at Chesapeake City, Md.) In her large oils she's seeking both roots and universality, so some of her images seem almost ritualistic in their strength and presence. And despite a relaxed avoidance of anything profound in her handling of figures of adult bathers and children on the sandy beach, there's always a physicality about them. All these things give this show its bite, substance and ideological muscle tone.

Bucks painters at Muse

"Abstracted: Take Five" at Muse Gallery introduces five Bucks County abstract painters, retirees in their "second careers" who are venturing together to Philadelphia, some for the first time. Their mission: to proclaim a renewing of Bucks' abstract painting tradition, with their own comfort zone being abstract expressionism.

Even the subdued tonalities of some of these paintings have the muted quality of memory. A liking for the forces of nature and spirit expressed in paintings by Armor Keller and Robert Hansen captures this show's thrust. It's gestural painting, yet marked by painterly finesse and sensitive use of color, and seems to have progressed toward a softer, looser abstraction.

Lynn Miller favors an at-times-unnerving isolation of elements, then attempts to reconnect them with much vigor. There's something dramatic, even theatrical about Rose Marie Strippoli's crude but savory free-wheeling energy, while Loretta Montgomery's slender, sinewy shapes, often with earth colors predominating, suggests a relaxed avoidance of profundity.

Worth a look

Thirty area artists showing 60 works in all media are featured in the compact theme exhibition "The Eyes Have It" at Salon des Amis in Malvern - one of its best ever.

In terms of imagery, this show's alive with overt emotion and dramatic emphasis, but is also often into something edgy. Artist members of the Philadelphia-area Dumpster Divers group sprang into action to participate, using found objects. One of them, Chanthaphone Rajavong, produced an elaborate light sculpture, I/I, that's surely the display's most diverting piece, while Divers Jonas dos Santos and Burnell Yow! have achieved subtler results working with simpler ingredients.

Some of the show's most interesting eyefuls are Joe Gorman's handsome T.V.Eyes digital print; the brooding, pent-up energy stirring in Jim Ulrich's trumpet-playing, meticulously sculpted Miles, Smoldering Cool, as well as Jeff Kimmel's pug dog oil portrait and Doug Donnelly's creature photo close-ups. Faces with memorable eyes include images by Betsy Alexander, Alden Cole, Robin Dintiman, Tim Dixon, Lisa Ford, Alice Hyvonen, Annie Patrizi, and Carol Wisker.