Sellenraad ‘Paintings' exhibit opens

| 29 Sep 2011 | 08:00

    NARROWSBURG - “Paintings” by Johan Sellenraad opens Saturday, Jan. 28 at the Delaware Arts Center Gallery at 37 Main Street, Narrowsburg, N.Y. The opening reception will be held from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The exhibit runs through Feb. 17. Johan Sellenraad is a pictorial painter. As an artist of eye, hand and mind, he looks at his surroundings and finds possibilities for paintings. Objects become still-lifes, which can become interiors, sometimes complete with figures and surrounding landscapes. “The fact that all these visual categories which include still-lifes, interiors, figures and landscapes have been around for thousands of years make painting all the more challenging. In a sense, every painting has to stand up against this massive body of representational art from the past. So ideas for paintings come from your surroundings as well as the history of art,” the artist said. With this in mind, location, as in real estate, is everything. In Sellenraad’s case his studio in Milanville, Pa. has served him well for the last ten years. Whatever moves through or around his studio has the chance of landing in a painting. There are countless pitfalls of irrelevance, pandering, overexposure, and various other traps. There is also the challenge of the natural artistic process that leads from painting to painting. Sellenraad said, “My major concern is expanding my pictorial language. It is not about replication. It is about creating life, which by inference has to be new.” Sellenraad was born and grew up in Holland. He came to Chicago as a teen-ager and earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from the University of Chicago. He taught at Roosevelt University and Parsons School of Design and still teaches painting at Long Island University in Brooklyn. He had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum and has had work in numerous museums and galleries. He had a previous show at the DVAA in 1999 and has shown at the Nutshell. He has had major public art commissions in New York City, Flint Michigan and Phoenix Arizona. He was a NEA Fellowship recipient and his work is in major collections.