Monday, February 26th, 2024
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Babette Bloch, Vitruvian Man Sculpture
Babbette Bloch is a pioneering sculptor in the use of laser-cut and water jet-cut stainless steel in creating figurative works of art. Her sculptures explore form and the interplay between object and light, reflect their environments, and expand the ways in which stainless steel is used in contemporary art.
In cutting, shaping, burnishing, and grinding stainless steel, Bloch has developed the material’s natural properties of brightness and reflectivity while making the dense metal seem nearly weightless and ethereal. Her distinctive approach is seen in public commissions in her silhouetted and larger-than-life-sized Reflecting History series, seen in Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, SC, and Hudson Heritage Farm, Ganges, MI. The fully molded floral and wildlife sculptures from her Reflecting Nature series are on view in museum and private collections in the U.S. and in Europe.
In her larger works, Bloch collaborates with structural engineers to ensure the long-term stability of the sculptures. Works range from tabletop scale to her monumental vase series, some of which are well over 6’ tall, to her recently completed 16-foot Vitruvian Man (Enterprise Corporate Park, Shelton, CT), an interpretation in stainless steel of the iconic drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Many of her works are created in a range of scales. All are limited editions.
Bloch’s works are in the permanent collections of Brookgreen Gardens; Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL, B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, Washington, DC; Hudson Heritage Farm, Ganges, MI; International Hillel, Washington, DC; Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD; and numerous private collections in Europe and the U.S.
She pursued both classical and modern training, including study with notable artists Deborah Butterfield and, at the celebrated art department of University of California at Davis, where she received her degree, with Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, and Manuel Neri. Bloch has received numerous awards, including those bestowed by the National Arts Club, Salmagundi Club and Museum, and the National Association of Women Artists.
Carole Eisner was born in 1937 and raised in New York City. After receiving her BFA from Syracuse University in 1958, Eisner worked as a designer for several fashion houses in New York City, where she garnered industry awards including Mademoiselle Magazine’s “Best Young Designer” in 1961.
After the first of her five children was born, Eisner began to paint at home. “I didn’t have a studio in our first apartment, so I threw tarps on the sofas and just started to paint,” she says. Shortly after, Eisner began to experiment with scrap metal, welding sculptures that grew in scale as her artistry progressed over the following decades.
Eisner's longevity as an artist is a testament to the natural marriage between her metal sculptures and works on canvas. Over a 50 year career, Eisner has had dozens of solo exhibitions across the United States and several internationally. She has participated in group shows at The Guggenheim Collection and other notable museums. Eisner is represented in private, public, and corporate collections and has been published in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Who’s Who in American Art, and Vogue.
Eisner currently resides in Weston, Connecticut with her husband.
Ted Lawson is a contemporary watercolor artist who started his art career in high school in Phoenix, Arizona. Even though Ted was good in high school art he chose engineering school over art school. Through his career in engineering converting crude oil into gasoline and jet fuel he studied with nationally known watercolor instructors Gerald Brommer, Tony Couch and Fred Graff as well as with his mentor, Bette Elliott.
Ted creates art using “the things that people see and use every day” as his inspiration. His ideas involving common everyday scenes or objects spring from his extensive foreign and domestic travels as well as glimpses of New York City. Ted continuously strives to accomplish the goal of creating something that is entertaining and thought provoking for other people to look at and enjoy.
Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Ted resides in Canton, Ohio with his wife Patricia, a former high school Spanish teacher. Their one daughter, Emily is a theatre attorney. She and her husband Guy work in the Broadway production niche in Manhattan. Ted is a signature member of the American Watercolor Society, the Ohio Watercolor Society and the Akron Society of Artists.
A friend once remarked to Ted about his two disparate careers, one in art the other in engineering by asking how an engineer became a watercolor artist. Ted replied, “Consider Leonardo DaVinci”.
Scott Van Campen is a metallurigcal artisan, sculptor, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his BFA in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1993. Van Campen has served as President of New York Custom Creations, LLC for the past twenty years, as well as being the Executive Director of Makerspace NY since 2013.
Doug Sheer is the only child of two painters who were WPA artists, Artist Union members and Hans Hofmann students in NYC and Provincetown and he grew up in New York's Greenwich Village. He was educated in NYC including Rhodes School where Pop artist Jim Dine was his art teacher and at Rhode Island School of Design.
A painter, he was a pioneering video artist who ran the Egg Store video facility in Tribeca in the 1970s and served fellow video artists including Nam-June Paik, Charlotte Moorman,Twyla Tharp, Bill Viola, Merce Cunningham, Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono. Some of his recent paintings can be seen at www.douglasisheer.com.
In 1974 he was a co-founder of Artists Talk on Art, www.atoanyc.org the art world's preeminent forum which has featured 8,500 artists in over 1,000 recorded panels and dialogues. He was board chairman and became chairman emeritus in 2019. He currently serves as its president.
He has served as a board member of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and currently serves on its exhibition committee. He is also a member of the education committee of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. He created and ran the Byrdcliffe Forum during the pandemic period and was the producer of its Zoom programs including its ten part "Woodstock Masters" series events (found on the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild channel on YouTube) and curated an exhibit of those artists called "Sense of Place" in August and September of 2022.