So Shahinian Fine Art decamped to Hudson, which at first “was really good. It was a huge storefront, and from the day it opened until September 14, 2008, I had all new people,” 95 percent of whom were walk-ins. Then Lehman Brothers crashed, and business abruptly stopped.
In the summer of 2010, he moved to two rooms on the third floor of 22 East Market Street in Rhinebeck, where he has been ever since. A job doing installations at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies’ Hessel Museum of Art has helped him to survive financially through the years of ups and downs.
So how’s business in Rhinebeck? So-so. The town’s “more culturally engaged” folks come into the gallery less and less, replaced, since Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, by what he terms “the pizza-and-ice-cream crowd”: less well-heeled day-trippers. That said, he has noticed some new people: mainly visitors from the Metro area, which he hopes will lead to more business.
Shahinian’s initial concept was to show artists from all over, especially from the West Coast, as well as indigenous art from the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. But most visitors prefer work from the region. Still, “More and more we’re now selling art based on the quality, not on whether it’s regional,” he said, noting that one of the three artists in the current show, Karl Dempwolf, is from California. He represents a core stable of 20 artists, in addition to 15 others, as well as a couple of estates. Most of the work consists of paintings, prints and photography. He eschews conceptual, multimedia and Photorealist art. “I like looser work that goes below the surface,” he said. Joanna, his wife, is now retired and helps him out.
Shahinian fears that galleries like his will fade out. “In many ways, I feel like a kind of dinosaur,” he said. “As our older clients age out and die, we are not seeing the younger generation coming to replace them. In a soon-coming age of people addicted to a virtual, endlessly adolescent lifestyle, will there be a place for our kind of art encounter to have any viability?” If you hope the answer is “Yes,” visit Shahinian Arts soon to see some fine painting in the flesh: a pleasure that we can no longer take for granted.
Three artists interpret the luminous landscape
The 16th annual “Luminous Landscape” show at Albert Shahinian Fine Art, located at 22 East Market Street in Rhinebeck, features three artists, each with a distinctive voice. Two are from the region. Kate McGloughlin, who is based in Olivebridge and teaches at the Woodstock School of Art, is represented by her loose but crisply articulated and mostly small paintings of the local countryside, along with her monoprints, including a series of barns, each reduced to the whisper of a silhouette in a wash of color and tones. The prolific McGloughlin revels in a painterly touch, elemental form and often, despite her love of barnyards, wild, melancholy nature.
New Paltz-based painter Thomas Sarrantonio, who is assistant professor of Art at SUNY-New Paltz, works in a square format, which serves to abstract his close-up view of meadows, replete with wildflowers, into a flat design. He also paints landscapes in which the strong horizontal line of a pancake-flat field is a foil for a lone tree or other singular feature. His small, dense strokes of bright color lend his work the quality of a tapestry.
The third painter, Karl Dempwolf, is from California, and right away you know that his colorful landscapes aren’t from here. His forms are defined as squiggles and patches of color, which cohere at a distance into a mountain view, often framed by trees, that is powerfully felt; in his work, the brilliant chromatic harmonies of Impressionism combine with an expressionistic touch, so that we feel the truthfulness of his scenes and can almost smell the scented air and feel the dry heat. Dempwolf, now in his 70s, is a veteran of the California Impressionist movement, and his paintings evidence a landscape far more colorful and varied than our own, with its omnipresent green. California dreamin’, indeed!
“The Luminous Landscape,” through October 20, Thursday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Sunday, 12 noon-5 p.m., & by appointment, Albert Shahinian Fine Art, 22 East Market Street, Rhinebeck; (845) 876-7578, www.shahinianfineart.com.
