The New Haven Free Public Library Gallery

133 Elm Street (Lower Level) New Haven, CT 0 6510

Listening to Light and Color:

Water Works by Deborah Curtis and Sooky Maniquant
Artists Reception: Saturday, November 5, 2 to 4 PM.

Poetry Reading at 3:00 PM by Guest Curator Poet Richard Harteis

(Re scheduled by the storm)

Deborah Curtis: "Pathway to the Water - Harkness" 14” x 18” Pastel on Pastel board

The William Meredith Foundation and the Azoth Gallery present a two-person exhibit of
artworks by Connecticut artist Deborah Curtis and French artist Sooky Maniquant at the New
Haven Public Library Gallery. Ms. Curtis, with a BSFA from Northeastern, and experience as a
Medical Professional Photographer, uses primary and complimentary colors to ignite emotion in
an exploration of dreamlike worlds and of nature, as an infinite timeless array of light reflected
upon mass, air and liquid. Sooky Maniquant, born in Vietnam in 1934, and studied in
Paris, uses her knowledge of Océanian, European, African, and Asian cultures to express her
vision of the “vivid forces” of Nature.

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Deborah Curtis

Deborah Curtis has combined her interests in science, technology and the visual arts. She
graduated from Northeastern University with a Bachelor of Science in Fine Arts through a joint
program at The Art Institute of Boston. She was employed at Retina Associates in Boston for
more than eight years as an ophthalmic photographer and associate media manager. "Being
employed in medical and defense media/photography has helped me create my fine art and
photographs. My Professional Medical Photography skills delegate how I produce “art” to
market."

"My palette can be organic, using limited two/three primary/complimentary color choices,"
writes Deborah. "I also explore the primary hues and only blend its compliment for shadows and
rendering edges giving the art piece a dreamy like effect not normally found in reality. In either
depiction, I like to simplify my art to its baseline and work outward.

Deborah Curtis: "Around the Misty Bend - Harkness" 32" x 42" oil on linen canvas

"I love using technology to capture what I find unusual and beautiful, which expedites the
exploratory process for my creative statements. I enjoy nature as an infinite timeless array of
light reflected upon mass, air and liquid igniting emotion through ones mind, body and
spirit. Art to me is the sum expression of passion combining all these things in harmony, a
marriage between the study of life and the media of technology. Most of her current works are
in series.

Since the 1980s, Deborah has exhibited her art work in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and
Connecticut. She has painted en plein air, and has often attracted media attention while
rendering exteriors of Connecticut resorts, inns and sunsets along the Connecticut and Rhode
Island shorelines. Deborah has taught a myriad of workshops: abstract, figures, animal portraits
in pastels and mixed media collage in New London at Granite Street Gallery, Studio 33, and art
classes in Norwich at Art Works, which featured a retrospective of her works in 2010. In 2009,
she had a solo show of 18 portraits of women. She also teaches in private homes/studios and is
commissioned for photography and art work.

Deborah Curtis: “Contiguous Wave” – Harkness 11” x 14” Oil on linen canvas

Sooky Maniquant

Sooky Maniquant was born in Vietnam in 1934 and brought up in the South Pacific.
She studied in Paris, and traveled through the world, using every occasion to deepen her
knowledge of Océanian, European, African, Asiatic, and most particularly of Japanese
civilizations. Very early, she makes the choice to live, more often as not, on the Luberon, her
“sacred mountain”, where she feels nearer to the “vivid forces” of Nature.

Maniquant first met William Meredith in Paris and Avignon when William was invited to
participate in the Avignon festival. In the piece "After William Meredith," the Meredith poems
are presented in both his original English and a French translation, juxtaposing the text with
images rendered by Sooky Maniquant. "After William Meredith" places artwork and poems side
by side, allowing the viewer to experience Meredith's work from two different
perspectives: Meredith's verses and Maniquant's striking visual interpretations:

In 2002: Exposition "round in water, magic Circles" were variations on 20 poems of William
Meredith and Richard Harteis at the European Center of Poetry of Avignon. In 2006 at
the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London CT : "AFTER WILLIAM MEREDITH" Spiral
Forces were graphic connivances of Sooky Maniquant on poems by W.Meredith and R.Harteis.

"It is the universe seized in its innermost transformation which is revealed, but remains
surprising, by static as these chalk cliffs, boiling under the midday sun, terrorized by the heat and
silence, dully crackling on the limit of exploding, a stilled furnace overflowing onto the whole
space of canvas in a thick wave…. World in distress, but held back by the artist’s hand on the
brim of emptiness…Solidified by the appearance, sealed into its vibrations, calm and taut as a
mummified monster of a dormant weapon.” ~Paul-Louis Rossi
CLICK HERE FOR DIRECTIONS
Sooky Maniquant "Air Heroes" 24" x 36" silkscreen print on paper

“Sooky Maniquant’s main preoccupation is to find in the mysterious existence of each one’s
interior life (thing or being), and to translate this magic by her work, therefore suggesting,
particularly for the works of 1963-1969, incomparable energy of volcanoes, beyond the “canvas”
of the painted artwork. But reality complicates itself with the parallax “time-space” thus
“perpetual movement” of which the artist will approach the research of expression more
precisely in her collages from 1969. 1974, first tapestry: this material, treated in a very personal
way, with its contours conceived in the mass of the work, enables her to pursue further in her
researches: the continuity of the material, the heat and sphere of the surface, the vibrations of
colours where the blacks and whites quiver, continue to express anxiety faced with the mystery
of life. ~Henry Galy-Carles
Sooky Maniquant "In the Middle of a Long Friendship" 24" x 36" silkscreen print on paper

"But," Richard Harteis writes, "the mystery of life is also the one of death, of suffering, of horror,
and for Sooky is an obsession. As from 1994 she often combines this with poetry, in opposition
to wars. She puts together stucco, which proclaims her despair, in long kit form installations. In
2001, she returned to photography as a means of expression."
Sooky Maniquant "Tiger at the Water" 24" x 36" silkscreen print on paper

Exhibition: October 16 - November 30, 2011

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CLICK HERE FOR DIRECTIONS
Gallery Hours:
Monday: 12 - 8 pm
Tuesday - Thursday: 10 am - 8 pm
Friday: 10 - 5 pm
Saturday: 10 am - 5 pm
Sunday: closed
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Commentary by Richard Harteis:

In a remarkable series of dramatic monologs entitled HAZARD THE PAINTER, the poet
William Meredith traces the life of his "imaginary playmate," an artist saddled with all the
accouterments of middle class life in America: house, car, wife, in-laws, children, and cat. In one
poem, Hazard notes,

"The cat is taking notes against

his own household. He watches.
Hazard would like once to see
things with the cat’s eyes, flat.

It seems to me in Deborah Curtis’ paintings that she has mastered the vision of Hazard’s cat.
Like the canvases of Milton Avery, they are stripped of all unnecessary detail, landscapes
reduced their purest essence, Platonic images if you wish, of ocean-ness, of what it really means
to walk the beach alone on a summer’s day. While the work is clearly representational, it focuses
on color relations and is not overly concerned with creating the illusion of depth as is most
conventional painting. Like Avery or Matisse, such stripping away takes courage for one living
in what is perhaps the country’s foremost bastion of landscape painters. The Lyme tradition runs
deep as a deer tick after gardening in southeastern Connecticut. If you want photo realism or
perfect impressionist landscapes, this is the place to shop. Some may find her work radical for
being too abstract; some lovers of Abstract Expressionism may find it too representational. What
is clear is that Curtis has developed her own unique voice which is always the mark of a serious
poet or artist. In another HAZARD poem, the painter spends an afternoon skydiving and reflects:

The colors of autumn

are becoming audible through the haze.
It does not matter that the great masters
could see this without flight, while
dull Hazard must be taken up and dropped.
He see it.

Curtis sees it too, and "hears" color like a master which is why her work sings to us so
beautifully.

For a painter, I would imagine water would be one of the most difficult subjects to capture, even
more than light, or perhaps because of it. Light captured in a drop of water, or an ice crystal, or a
breaking wave is as evanescent as a summer’s breeze. And natural light is central to her painting,
which is why Ms. Curtis works so often en plein air. This harmony of light and color,
particularly as it applies to water and seascape marks her as one of the regions finest new talents
whose work we celebrate. If only Hazard and William were here today to enjoy it with us.

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Sponsored by the William Meredith Foundation
Gallery Curator: Johnes Ruta
(203) 387-4933
azothgallery@comcast.net
http://azothgallery.com/gallery.htm