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New paintings by artist Hilda Green Demsky will be shown in her solo exhibition at Pleiades Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, 4th Floor in Chelsea from November 2nd through November 27th. Two opening receptions will be held for the exhibition, on Thursday evening November 4th from 6 to 9 p.m. and on Saturday evening, November 6th from 3 to 6 p.m. There will be complimentary refreshments and live music at the receptions. All are invited to attend.
Eleanor Heartney, Contributing Editor of Art in America, wrote in the catalog of Ms. Demsky’s exhibition at The National Gallery of Costa Rica: "Demsky’s waterfalls put us back in touch with an essential part of our own natures. Elemental and powerful, they urge us to put aside the materialism and egotism of contemporary life and celebrate the natural world.”
Ms. Demsky is an artist who is thoroughly connected to the earth by painting its water. Having traveled the world over as a recipient of many national and international awards, her art calls the viewing public to awareness of the earth’s beauty and natural resources. Ms. Demsky merges abstraction with reality as she paints the Atlantic Ocean from Ireland to Maine on canvas and aluminum. The artist continues to explore the reflective qualities of light and the terrain. Demsky’s landscapes are specific and recognizable. She records moments of tranquility and the forces of water.
The paintings reflect her artist residencies at Acadia National Park in Maine and an international residency in County Kerry, Ireland. She said, “It was the cliffs, sparkling waters, mists and tides that captivated me,” in her exhibition, entitled ”The Atlantic from Ireland to Maine. Painting on aluminum reflects the light and approximates the ephemeral effects of water in the landscape."
Ms. Demsky has received many national awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship ( painting in Italy), a Fulbright Fellowship to The Netherlands, a Puffin Foundation grant (environmental art) and a Christa McAuliffe Fellowship from the United States Government(research on women artists). After attending a shuttle launch at The Kennedy Space Center as a guest of NASA, she began to create space paintings of the cosmos. Deeply influenced by the movies taken by the astronauts and the images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, she explored outer space, star explosions, nebulae, comets and other celestial phenomena. Many new paintings unfolded, and Ms. Demsky became an active member of the International Association of Astronomical Artists.
Currently, her focus has moved from the cosmos to the earth, and she returned to the subject of water as a source of life and sustenance. Her waterfall paintings are visions of the forces of nature and the energy of life. She has visited waterfalls in Yellowstone National Park, Bull’s Bridge and Chapman Falls in CT., Niagara Falls, the Delaware Water Gap Recreational Park, Bushkill Falls in the Poconos, PA., Shenandoah National Park, VA., Hawaii and Costa Rica. She painted the ocean environment as an Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park, Maine and on the coast of Ireland.
For Hilda, water cascading creates music. All the things that water represents come to her mind—the power, purity, meditative capacity, the ions that give her a “lift,” the way that water is constantly recycling from clouds to rain to rivers, how it alters rocks, transports us to far-off places and sustains life. Her main reason for painting is to express her strong feelings about the natural beauty of our planet.
Ms. Demsky received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from Carnegie Mellon University and an MA in Art Education from Hunter College. At Hunter, she studied sculpture with George Sugarman and Tony Smith and painting with Fritz Bultman; at CMU, she studied painting with Sam Rosenberg and color with Josef Albers.
In July, she painted in Ireland on an artist residency from Cill Rialaig Foundation on the Ring of Kerry. In August, these paintings and others created at Acadia National Park were exhibited at Hammond Hall Arts Center in Winter Harbor, Maine.
Ms. Demsky’s art reflects her love of color and her continual exploration of capturing reflective light. Eleanor Heartney, contributing editor of ‘Art in America’ says, “ Demsky’s waterfalls put us back in touch with an essential part of our own natures. Elemental and powerful, they urge us to celebrate the natural world that came before us and will be here long after we are gone.”
More information on Hilda's paintings, her career and about the November exhibition at Pleiades Gallery can be seen at hildademsky.com. She can be contacted by phone at (914) 318-4443 or by email to hildademsky[.]optimum.net.
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