Posted: March 8, 2011 While most of us have spent the past few months trying to keep our heads above the snow, a dedicated group of local volunteers has already been setting its sights on next fall. Their mission…a town-wide celebration of the Armonk Outdoor Art Show’s 50th anniversary on September 24 and 25, 2011.
Now ranked as one of America’s best fine art and craft shows, the show has blossomed from humble beginnings. In 1961, the Friends of the North Castle Public Library, including Charles Elson, Lucille Bruno and Jean West, decided to try an outdoor art exhibition as a way to raise funds for the library. With only a handful of artists showing their work on the lawn of St. Stephen’s Church bordering Main Street, the Armonk Outdoor Art Show was born. The show soon outgrew the churchyard and was relocated to the parking lot in front of the library.
Accompanying the small yet fine display of art in the early days were memorable, cakes, pies and much-loved Art Show brownies, baked by volunteers including Ruth Papale and her daughters in the Methodist Church kitchen. Schultz’s famous cider was always there to wash it all down. As the show and its crowds grew, the venue again changed, first to the Legion Field in front of Town Hall and finally to its current home at Community Field in 1997. Now, along with 185 exhibitors from across the country and around the world, an extensive food court and children’s activities, art lovers come from near and far. Each year, thousands of visitors flock to see an ever-changing display of paintings, photography, sculpture, jewelry and more.
As the show has grown, so, too, has its group of volunteers, now numbering 300. Every year, as one show winds down the next is already in the works. Behind all the brainstorming and community outreach is a hard-working and fun-loving group of people who strive to make the art show the best it can be. You, too, can be a part of the art show history. New volunteers and new ideas are always welcome!
Visit Mariani Gardens through the end of April, where 20-year Armonk Outdoor Art Show veteran Charles Wildbank’s works are on exhibit.
Pop Artist Michael Albert's cereal box collage of Reduce, Reuse & Recycle for North Castle.
Armonk's Art Gallery
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Students as Artists
Updated January 28, 2011
On Thursday January 20, the Byram Hills Art Show went up at the high school. Hundreds of pieces of student art were displayed at Byram Hills High School last week during the annual middle and high school winter art show. Revealing a huge display of talent, Byram Hills students showed their work in a variety of media, from pen and pencil, to wire, to clay, to watercolor, photography and digital art. Byram Hills Fine Arts Director Joy Varley says the winter art show captures the transformation of students' artwork from sixth through twelfth grade. Varley said the students present their work in class and share their approaches with one another. We talked with several students about the transferal of their creative thoughts onto paper. Studio Art
Freshman Jake Goldman explained his drawing of a flower on a table. Jake used colored pencils to draw the lines and shapes of a flower on a sheet of white paper and highlighted it with pastels. Next, he held the paper upside down, not to look at the object as a flower, but as a combination of distinct shapes. The leaves of the stem are two triangles. He drew it like he saw it, with different layers and shapes over one another. The composition of lines and shapes is interpreted in colors. A red layer faded out to a green layer in the center over another layer of red. Different pressures of the pencils created darker shadows closer to the flower, creating dimension.
AP Photography Oranges
On a class trip to The Museum of Modern Art's New Photographry 2010 exhibit, Emily Galowitz was inspired by photographs of Elad Lassry. She took one photo and adjusted the vibrancy, saturation, brightness and contrast. And then she created a new layer that was more translucent and shifted it to create movement in a still object. A sheer layer of blue made the clementines more three dimensional like you could grab one off the paper. The texture of the fleece contrasts the smoothness of the fruit. Emily's background is the inside of a fleece sweatshirt that matches the color of the clementines, just as Lassry focused on his subjects with the same colored background.
AP Photography Pears
Emily worked a composition of symmetry with layers of a photo. Then she added a copy of the photo and the background layers as a shadow. She says she played with shadow and contrast on the background which created a three dimensional appearance. She used five layers in total: two shadows, the pears themselves and a copy of the pears and the background. While she doesn't like red and green since it appears a little christmas like, she decided to go with a more fruity darker tone of red for the background.
Drawing
Dominick LaGravinese used oil pastels to draw a self-portrait of himself as a young boy, based off a photograph. Another student named it as their favorite piece in the show. Dominick's Jimi Hendrix rendition is done in black pen and ink.
As for other artistic pursuits, Dominick says he'll be playing the Phantom in the Byram Hills Stage 2011 presentation of The Phantom of the Opera. The performance will be this March and he hopes everyone will attend.
Graphic Design I
A photograph of a character such as
Pikachu was an experiment using mathematical tools of the illustrator
graphic program. Creating multiple lines--drawn inside and outside of
the photograph, Junior Alex Chen used the graphic tools to give an
illusion of movement. The text was done with the text tool, dropping the
text layout over the background. Alex looks forward to Graphic Design 2
next semester.
The rise in interest in digital art was especially noticeable at this year's event, with sophisticated software programs allowing students increasingly greater expression.
"Students are exposed to all forms of art media in our art courses," says Varley. "Digital art is incorporated in varying degrees in each of our art courses, starting with Studio Art. At the Advanced Placement level, students create works that blend traditional media of drawing, painting, sculpting and darkroom photography with digital technology to create unique artworks that reflect the artists' creativity and vision."
The next chance to see student artwork will be at the AP Art Show April 12 - 14 at the high school.
Eremitical Dawn by David Parker. Welded Steel, 1970 Byram Hills High School.
Outdoor sculpture by Charles Perry from the late 1980's at 80 Business Park Dr.
Photographer Glen Sider
Click images to enlarge
Glen Sider, Photographer
By Amanda Oliphant
“I guess my message is: Stop and smell the roses,” Glen Sider muses over coffee. Sider comes from an art family. His father is a retired artist, but the elder Mr. Sider practiced a business-sided art: he was an illustrator for ad agency. Sider himself loves illustrating, and recounts how his mother wanted him to go into medical illustration because he was so precise. His father especially warned him to try and use his talents for a more “practical” job. “’Don’t be an artist,’ he warned me!” Well, he didn’t become an illustrator, of fine art or commercial, although he says he does still sketch occasionally, for fun. No, Glen Sider is a photographer, and he owes the passion to the childhood neighbor who gave him a Canon A8E for his Bar Mitzvah. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s a really nice camera.” And now, his father is one of his biggest fans. Sider toyed around with the camera casually, and never went in for academic training. He found his interest really picked up after college. A life-long nature lover; he was drawn to photographing the great outdoors. This is still one of his main topics. He always stops and smells, and shoots, the roses and the irises and the rocks and the snow. “People ask me, ‘Oh where did you shoot that fence? Where’s that beautiful path?’ It’s just up the road from my house! A lot of the stuff I shoot is within twenty-five minutes of Armonk,” Sider laughs, and this is exactly his point. There is so much beauty around us—in the way flower petals open or the not-quite geometric placements of pebbles—but more often than not, we don’t notice it, we trudge along on our way to work or school or errands. Another common theme in his work is the abstraction of color, such as we see in his recent close-ups of snowboards, which were taken at Mount Snow, Vermont. He admits that as a youngster, painting was always his failing. He could draw just about anything if handed a pencil, but a paint-brush was his weakest tool. Perhaps, we suggested, in his photography, he is exploring what he couldn’t grasp onto in his early life as an artist. “Huh, I never thought of that before, this is like a therapy session!” He laughed. As our conversation winded down, Sider said, “I’m just trying to make the most out of my view finder, what can I make out of that little rectangle?”
