Patrick Malin
"Nature itself is worthy of our awe," so says Providence painter Patrick Malin.
If it's a beautiful day and the light is just right, you might catch sight of Patrick Malin on River Road in Providence as he sets up his easel and begins to paint. Malin is a 'plein air' painter, an artist who works outdoors, directly in front of and immersed in nature. For this former abstract painter, nature is an almost religious source of inspiration.
Born and brought up outside of Philadelphia in Cherry Hill, New Jerey, Malin always had an interest in the arts. He attended a liberal arts college with the intention of studying physics, but "quickly learned that art was it for me." Malin transferred to the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia where he spent his time "exclusively focused on painting, 24 hours a day." After a two-year hiatus, he attended graduate school at Pennsylvania State University where he began to work on a series of large-scale geometric paintings. After some soul-searching on the difficulty of making a living as a fine artist, Malin decided to apply to Seton Hall University to study Museum Administration.
At Seton Hall, Malin co-curated an exhibition entitled "Current Perspectives on the Urban and Industrial Landscape." The exhibit garnered regional attention and earned a review in the New York Times. It also started Malin thinking about nature and the landscape. His heavy school and work schedule cut into his painting time and he decided to leave the museum studies program and the field. He was working far too many hours and not making enough money to justify all of the time spent away from his studio.
After several years in upstate New York, he decided to move to Providence. It was a good city - both for an artist and for two people looking for a change. Malin was evolving in his painting. Then 9/11 happened.
His large-scale geometric abstractions were labor intensive and took many months to complete. "It was an untenable situation," Malin explains. "How do you sell a painting for $1000 when you've spent four or five months on it? My crisis was essential," Malin continued. Not only was he completing no more than two paintings a year; he felt the work appealed to only a handful of people. He wanted to make paintings that "were deeply meaningful and relevant to someone who knows a lot about painting," but also attracted people on a 'gut' level.
The transformation took about two years. Now Malin paints small works on paper that are quick and gestural in nature and deceptively simple. Malin works exclusively outdoors in the nature he reveres. "I am really in the moment when I am painting, really in touch with something, and striving to capture something beyond myself." Malin's work brings to mind the paintings of English romantic painter John Constable and the pre-impressionistic French painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.
MICHAEL GUERTIN
"I've been taking photos since I was seventeen," says Barrington photographer Michael Guertin. But it wasn't until the advent of digital photography that Guertin was able to manipulate the medium to reflect his personal viewpoint of the world.
Other than a few art history classes in college, Guertin didn't really focus on making art. It wasn't until he was a graduate student at University of Texas at Austin that he began his study of cognitive psychology and visual processing. He was fascinated by the ways in which people used memory as they read. Certain words and phrases trigger visual memories. Guertin studied how people think and how they utilize those visual memories to process new information.
It wasn't just visual memory that interested Guertin. He was also intrigued by how people see. "The visual process {in human beings} is fine-tuned to amplify and find the edges in the environment. We use luminosity and color information to find objects and object contours in a 3-d world," Guertin says. "
Guertin wanted more. "I know how visual processing works," he explains, "but how do the techniques in art work?" Guertin began to look for the boundaries between objects. He checked books out of the library, read art magazines and looked at other photographers' work on photo.net. He found color contrast, demarcations between dark and light, shading, and enhanced edges all illuminating the interstice between objects.
Armed with theory, philosophy and a good camera, Guertin set out to make the pictures he saw in his head. He is always on the lookout for interesting patterns in water and ice. He juggles time pictorially, figuratively cutting an image apart into many versions of itself and weaving them back together. He stretches and manipulates images as he sees fit to create very stylized and personal viewpoints of the world.
Friends of his saw the work and told him he "should get those out there." "One year ago, I showed my first piece," Guertin says. "My friends are probably less surprised than I am about how well-received everything is," he muses quietly. He exhibits and sells his work in four different locations around the country and has received a Best in Show award at a juried exhibit on Cape Cod. His photographs can be viewed at www.i3images.com.