ON THE GREEN: ART, LIGHT AND INSPIRATION

“A Window’s View” by Louis Rissland of Shrewsbury (above) and “Counting Humans” by Ed Deverell of Little Silver (below) took prizes in the ‘Eyesights’ group photography show that continues through Saturday at the Guild of Creative Art.

With receptions and special events tonight, Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening, it’s a busy weekend for art lovers on and around the Greater Red Bank Green — one that begins with a reminder about Eyesights 2017, the annual juried group show that spotlights some of the area’s finest photographic talents at Shrewsbury’s Guild of Creative Art.

March 24, 2017 - 10:00 am | Comments ()

ON THE GREEN: GALLERY OPENINGS

Works by prize winners Joan Myers (above) and Peter Smejkal, (below) are among the featured works in the juried photography show ‘Eyesights,’ opening Sunday at the Guild of Creative Art.

Two highly anticipated annual juried art shows — one of them judged by a couple of Red Bank’s favorite f-stoppers — highlight a self-guided art walk for the month of March on the Greater Red Bank Green.

It begins this Saturday on the sidewalks of downtown Red Bank, where Monmouth Street fixture the Art Alliance of Monmouth County hosts an opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. for a pair of group shows organized under the themes URBAN and RURAL.

March 2, 2017 - 8:00 am | Comments ()

RED BANK: PUNNINGLY PAINTED, BY GEORGE

PIANO DIVE and other paintings by George Severini are the subject of both a book signing and a gallery exhibit that opens Friday evening at McKay Imaging. (Click to enlarge)

Taken together, the artworks comprise a collection that’s as much smile-inducing Joke Book as serious coffeetable conversation piece. A series of colorful Photoshop-crafted illustrations – executed with jazzy mid-century verve, each a playful riff on a musically-minded turn of phrase – the exhibit “Piano Dive” assembles a thematically linked cycle of throughly-modern images by one of the Red Bank area’s greatest conservators of visual history, George Severini.

July 16, 2015 - 6:22 am | Comments ()

LINCROFT: SPRING ARTS, SUMMER FUN

Nature photography by Colin Seitz is on the program for the first annual Spring Arts Festival at Thompson Park, May 2 and 3 — part of a weekend in which the county Parks System debuts its directory of summertime programs and activities.

Press release from Monmouth County Park System

Go on a kayak birding exhibition, build a fairy house in the garden, enjoy a twilight adventure around the campfire. It’s all within reach this summer, as the Monmouth County Park System introduces its annual summertime slate of arts & crafts, nature, recreation and sports programs.

Friday sees the publication of the Park System’s Program Directory summer issue. Available at most parks in the county system — including Thompson Park, Tatum Park, Deep Cut Gardens and Bayshore Waterfront Park, all in Middletown Township — the directory lists all special events and programs offered during June, July and August. Registration for summer programs begins on Wednesday, May 6 at 8 am. Online registration is available for most programs. Take it here or consult the directory for details about registering online, by phone, by mail or in person — and take it around the corner for details on an exciting all-new event going on during the first weekend in May.

April 24, 2015 - 7:00 am | Comments ()

RED BANK: SETTING SEITZ ON NATURE

“Rocks Beach Aruba” is among photographer Colin Seitz’s beautiful scenes of nature — in unnaturally beautiful black and white — on display starting Friday at McKay Imaging Gallery.

“More than one year ago, Colin Seitz walked through our door seeking, among other things, a show in our gallery,” explain Robert McKay and Elisabeth Koch-McKay, the visionary husband-wife photographer team behind downtown Red Bank’s McKay Imaging gallery. “We told him that his work was really quite beautiful, but that we wanted to see a lot more of it!”

Taking that as a cue, Seitz spent much of the next year out-of-doors, building up a body of work centered around the natural landscape, as rendered in richly detailed black and white — a decision that, in the words of the Brick-based lensman, “enables me to emphasize the magnitude of the scene without oversimplifying it with color.”

True to their word, the McKays have given Seitz the wall-space real estate (and the prime-time shopping season scheduling) for his first solo show of silver photographic prints.

December 10, 2014 - 6:00 am | Comments ()

RED BANK: UP AT McKAY’S, IT’S A 3-D WORLD

CACTI by Joel Zimmerman is just one of the photographer’s “anaglyph” 3-D images on display…glasses included…during a Saturday opening reception at McKay Imaging Gallery.

For a generation raised on such things, the “magic” of 3-D might seem as lumberingly prehistoric as this week’s model monster megaplex release. But when it comes to the world of art photography, the third dimension is a dimension largely left unexplored — until now, that is. When Robert McKay and Elisabeth Koch-MacKay open the door to their best-kept-secret McKay Imaging Gallery for the latest in their too-infrequent (and highly anticipated) events on Saturday night, they’ll be giving the gallery crowd something to truly shake up their wine and cheese — and throwing in a pair of 3-D glasses as a bonus.

The solo show matter-of-factly titled 3-D Images by Joel Zimmerman collects dozens of photos by the Freehold-based painter and art director, a Grammy nominated veteran of major record labels who’s worked on numerous high-profile releases by the Allman Brothers, Pearl Jam, Train and more. For the exhibit that opens with a May 17 reception between the hours of 7 to 10 pm, the McKays and Zimmerman have put together a display of what could be called literal “pop” art — with a retro twist.

May 16, 2014 - 12:00 pm | Comments ()

RED BANK: SELFIES KICK OFF ARTFUL WEEKEND

A selfie by Bob McKay is among the works on display in the group show FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE opening Friday at Gallery 135 in Red Bank.

Leave it to Gerda Liebmann – the Swiss-born, internationally exhibited multimedia artist (and redbankgreen Clippings correspondent) – to discern the beauty in so tawdry a device as the cellphone selfie.

Liebmann, who established Gallery 135 in the second-floor space shared by Red Bank Community Church, has employed this maybe-misunderstood signifier of 21st century life – and its cousin in succinct cinema, the Vine – as the basis for her new group show, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. Opening with a reception at 7 pm on Friday, the multimedia installation “will give viewers the opportunity to reconnect with the special intimacy and self-revelation that self-portraits uniquely offer,” she says.

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April 24, 2014 - 4:00 pm | Comments ()

UP AT McKAY’S: LEAVENS GETS LINEAR

This pencil-on-paper self portrait is among the “new and unknown” works by lifelong Red Banker Evelyn Leavens on display in a solo show that opens Friday evening at McKay Imaging Gallery. (Click to enlarge)

During a 2010 visit to the Red Bank house that she’s lived in since before the Great Depression, Evelyn Leavens told redbankgreen: Im still painting; Im always working… I wouldnt give it up any more than I would move out of my home.

That particular article (which can be read here in its entirety) advanced a solo show drawn from the remarkable artist’s 60-year career, a display that we viewed as not so much a retrospective, but “a chance for Leavens to pause for one moment a moment in which the rest of us can struggle to catch up before sprinting ahead to the next challenge.”

Sure enough, here in 2012 there’s still much that is new, even much that’s yet to be discovered, in the world of Evelyn Leavens. On Friday evening, April 27, McKay Imaging Gallery brings us up to speed on her recent endeavors, with the opening reception of an exhibit that the octogenarian artist has described as being her “last show” (although, as she told the Two River Times, she’s “never convinced about that”).

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April 24, 2012 - 5:44 am | Comments ()