JUROR'S STATEMENT
The Faber Birren Color Award Show at the Stamford Art Association, now in its 40th year, invites artists from across the country and internationally to deploy color within their creative vision. To review such outstanding submissions and to make a selection on this basis was no easy task, but it was one that filled me with promise as I consider the courage and urgency of contemporary artistic practice.
The Faber Birren Color Award goes to Regina Quinn for the quiet vibrance of her Wetland at Dusk. In a present moment in which so much of our consumption of images-- in various forms of isolation-- is defined by the mediated sheen of digital screens, her masterful use of encaustic with oils and beeswax imbues her panel painting with an ambient life. The evening’s final hints of light seem to shift before the viewer’s eye; quite literally layered, periwinkle, umber, and marigold break through with striking effect to illuminate what appears at first glance to be a subdued palette, dominated by deep greens of the darkening coastline. Diane Ettienne Faxon Founders Award winner Jessica Alazraki’s energetic use of color unites the figurative elements and patterned forms in The Tiger. The PMW Award in memory of Patsy Murphey Whitman and Diane Ettienne Faxon was awarded to Nancy Breakstone, who captured a moment of geometric and tonal balance in the curves of the TWA Hotel at John F. Kennedy Airport, the architectural elements of the iconic building coalescing in yellow and deep blue hues within her striking composition. Peter Knapp received The Stone Studio Award in honor of Diane Ettienne Faxon for the brilliant color systems and geometric forms in Geometries of Promise and Conflict, a multimedia assemblage that seems to channel the theoretical links between color, emotion, and perception put forth by this exhibition’s namesake, Faber Birren.
Congratulations and a heartfelt thanks to the artists who shared their work in the present show. It was an honor to spend time in the company of your remarkable visions.
Sean O'Hanlan, Research Associate in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
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