April 7 – June 29th, 2022
The Atrium Gallery of the Moakley Courthouse, Boston, MA
Erica H. Adams, James Baker, Walter Crump, Tamara Krendel, CJ Lori & Joanne Tarlin.
curated by Erica H. Adams
Opening Reception Thursday June 2 (4-6 pm)
Watercolor, 46 x 42 inches, c 2021
photo credit: Will Howcroft
Watercolor on paper scroll, 7 by 4 feet, c 2021
photo credit: Will Howcroft
Night Flight, the Naming of the Birds, (November 2021) and its companion piece ‘Bird Tree, I Can Fly’ (September 2021)
For the last eight years I’ve travelled to sketch and paint this tree of birds– setting up in a swamp in S Carolina then later using my sketches in an attempt to recreate the experience of amazement and awe watching these various birds return to their tree at twilight.
Both paintings were inspired by a single nesting tree in this cypress-tupelo swamp that was continually animated by a stunning profusion of birds including Great White Egrets, Great Blue Herons and dark iridescent Anhingas –nesting and interacting together.
As the nestlings grew they increasingly exercised their magnificent wings – at times creating the illusion that the tree and/or their spirits could lift off.
Watercolor on board, 21 x 16 inches, 2021
photo credit: Will Howcroft
‘Night Flowers, Summer into Fall’ (or wild flowers in a glass) (October 2021)
I began working on this piece a week before leaving my painting retreat. The painting evolved as the flowers opened, stretched, went to seed and reached towards the harvest moon when it appeared outside the window. The curtains became shadowy Hemlocks and stars fell from the sky.
Since March 2020 all of my paintings have been or have evolved to become nocturnes.
I love how light and color can be transcendent, transforming what one sees and feels – and that deeply personal imagery can become universal, often revealing that we’re more similar than we are separate.
Bio
TAMARA KRENDEL received her BFA and MFA from The University of Pennsylvania and pursued independent post-graduate studies in Antwerp, Belgium* (*Painting independently, commuting to Brussels where she’d been granted permission to paint in King’s The Royal Glass Houses, and copying Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of the Fountain at The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp.)
Other honors and awards include Fulbright and Belgian Ministry of Dutch Culture Grants to Belgium and full fellowships to YADDO and Yale University’s Yale-Norfolk program.
She has exhibited, given talks, demonstrations and presentations at various venues including: The Whistler House Museum, Fort Point Channel Community Gallery, The Concord Art Association, The Attleboro Arts Museum and Widner’s Art Museum, she spoke at Mass General’s Illuminations program where her greenhouse series was recently on display. She has curated eight exhibits since 2002.
Tamara has taught art for many years designing classes at various schools and colleges.
Her work has been widely reviewed and is in many private and public collections.
Noted critic Burton Wasserman wrote in a review for Art Matters, of her exhibit of paintings at the Widener University Art Museum:
“Krendel exercises considerable poetic license, freely transforming the shape of growing plants and botanical settings in which they’re found into oil and watercolor compositions rippling with light and patterns of excitement. Poetic transcriptions of her most naked perceptions, these pictures are not observations based on external realities as much as they are playful inventions, inspired composites of jewel-like incandescence, sparkling vitality and imaginative joy…”
