HAMMOND MUSEUM & JAPANESE STROLL GARDEN - Key Persons
Hammond Museum curator Bibiana Huang Matheis, who frequently exhibit's Kukucka's work, calls her an "artists' artist" who everyone respects as a person of integrity and great skill.
Born in 1951 in New Rochelle, New York, Farrell's musical journey started with piano lessons during the 5th grade with Ivan Rosenthal, who also taught him how to read and write musical scores. Farrell taught himself the difficult skill of piano tuning
by ear from a mail order course at age 18. That was before the aide of electronic tuners in use today. By the age of 18 he was tuning pianos for clients, a skill he kept up for 45 years. Today, he can work magic on any piano, taking loving care of all its needs, nurturing it to perfect pitch and tone, or adjusting the sound and dynamic to meet the standards of even the most demanding concert pianists. He repairs and reconditions, balances, tunes and tone-voices the piano for himself and others. It's a steady livelihood to serve clients, few of whom know that Farrell is also prolific and inspiring composer with a specific mission - Sounds of Peace.
Joris is a thinker, someone who reads and analyses. The psychologist Jung is one of her influencers. She delves into philosophy and other intellectual pursuits. All of these aspects work their way into her art, albeit perhaps invisible to the viewer.
message. She evokes subtleties. The body language speaks, small movements project. Details like the dress she wears, or the way she holds her hand, exude intimacy and a feeling of belonging, a gentle romance between reality and symbolism. Her paintings evoke a form of grace, and often depict herself.
Gert Mathiesen's art kissed the sunshine. He could make colors sing, like Matisse. His love of music still radiates in his two dimensional picture planes and ceramic objects. Mathiesen's prints are seemingly alive, teeming in dance and exuberance. He had Picasso's playfulness and Paul Klee's powerful manifestations of inner creative freedom. Like Matisse, he understood form and shape. His artistic sensibilities were visual and spatial explorations, with inherent simplicity and infinite curiosity. Reflecting on his vast portfolio today, it is a multiplicity of constant experimentation. He was an exponent
of the artistic vanguard with his unlimited capacity for creativity. All of his work projects a purity, an innocence, in some way like Outsider art, naïve art or even folk art, which is also often of flat perspective, like many of Mathiesen's prints. To some untrained, self-taught artists, like the African American Bill Traylor, this playfulness came naturally. Others, like Picasso, strove for that essence during an entire life. Mathiesen was highly trained, yet his work is intrinsically joyous, unrestrained, and sophisticated in its inherent childlike simplicity and frankness. Mathiesen's limitless imagination let him have sheer fun with every project, with an underlying bit of mischievousness and whimsical freedom, a boundless willingness to play. Example: ‘Woman with a chicken on her head.'
Gert Mathiesen was born in 1951 in Esbjerg, Denmark. He came to the United States in 1986, initially as a potter in Martha's Vineyard. He attended the Kolding School of Arts and Crafts. He worked in France, Italy and Germany, worked with a variety of well-known ceramicists, including Bjorn Wiinblad and the German potter Meulindick. Upon his return to Denmark he worked with the manufacturer Royal Copenhagen. In 1986, he permanently relocated to New York. Mathiesen died tragically from an aneurysm in 2013 while visiting in his home country.
Ilse Schreiber Noll is a German-American immigrant. To try understand her intrinsic motivators, we must confront history. She was raised in the 1950s with the German post-WWII baby-boomer generation, during the time when vanquished Germany was rebuilding from the ruinous war. Germany was still de-Nazifying, and grappling with the devastation caused by the fascist dictatorship. The new generation was born into a fledgling democracy with a new Constitution based on the US model. This generation grew up with elders who lived through the Nazi era, some as complicit believers. These German kids came into adulthood carrying the harsh collective guilt of being German, with the shocking knowledge that their parents' generation had committed one of the greatest atrocities in the history of mankind. They would carry the burden of guilt for the destruction of the European Jewry, for two world wars and for worldwide devastation. The Zeitgeist of this generation was as much a confrontation with the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, and the war, as forging a commitment never again to allow it repeat. Part of coping with that reality was the emergence of the 1960's protest movement. They embraced strong anti-war sentiments, often looking to America for cultural, social and political inspiration. Americans had many role models in the arts and literature,
Originally from Bad Arolsen, a small town in northern Hesse, Germany, Ilse Schreiber Noll now resides in Croton-on Hudson, New York. In Germany, she pursued a career in physical therapy. She did not start her studies in art until she enrolled in the College of New Rochelle and subsequently at the State University of New York in Purchase, where she took a Masters in Fine Art in Printmaking and Book Art. At S.U.N.Y. she studied with the famed Italian-Uruguayan woodcut printmaker and Guggenheim Fellow Antonio Frasconi.
Jackie Merritt is a superb and witty songwriter. One of her most successful tunes is the sharply sardonic Mean Church People a poignant expose of hypocrisy, which Jackie Merritt reports is her most requested song. She articulated, "All of the songs that I've written are basic blues structure. My influences are Elizabeth Cotten - and actually the Appalachian bluegrass singer and banjoist Ola Belle Reed. It's from the heart, and the way I write it is to tell the truth. To me, that's what blues is all about, is telling the truth…"
Merritt is an artist at peace with herself. She has achieved success as a musician, songwriter and visual artist and found her stride as an artistic documentarian. No matter what muse she delves into, she is an old-fashioned storyteller.
Samper is a fine artist who delves into earthy, natural forms. She uses dry Japanese pigments made of real stones, which she applies with wax and Japanese ink, on thin, long-fibered Japanese paper, because, as she says, "Western paper swallows light." Her paper paintings are translucent, stating "Light is important in my work." Indeed, the element of light adds multi-dimensionality, modulation and movement. As an installation artist, her work is often holistic and multi-layered, combining design, painting and sculpture. Professing a dislike of yellow, her use of colors also reflects her native environment: earth tones, blue for the sky and sea, grey for the winter sky, dark greys and black for the volcanic rock, occasionally even red. The colors themselves project earthiness, something real, something you feel.
Priya Tambe was born and raised in India. Her father's job demanded that the family move all over the subcontinent. She has lived in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, each time having to adapt to a new culture and local dialects. Consequently, she is multi-lingual, speaking the local language in addition to Hindi and English. Her mother was an artist, an oil painter, and throughout her schooling, art was a constant in her life. In Delhi, she attended a progressive high school with a strong art program where she worked with clay and bronze, each humble, earthy materials with direct natural connection. She ended up studying
Economics and only secondarily art/sculpture as an undergraduate in Spokane, Washington. She took a Foreign Service graduate degree from the prestigious Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and ended up as an investment banker on Wall Street. Not a typical path for someone who is now a full-time artist.