NEW JERSEY: This spring, Elise Dodeles, recipient of a 2013 Fellowship for painting from the NJ State Council on the Arts, will be exhibiting her paintings at The Quiet Life gallery in Lambertville.
For this exhibition, Dodeles has continued to focus on portraiture. However, in addition to portraits of fighters and those culled from archives, she has expanded her subject matter to include paintings of family, people from her local community, and an occasional celebrity.
The artist says of her work: The last show I had at The Quiet Life consisted solely of fighters' portraits whose photographs I had found in the Rare Books Department at Princeton University. In those paintings I experimented with textures and colors in new ways. In the upcoming exhibition, I will take what I have learned from that series and include more personal imagery: members of my family, friends and other subjects that interest me, such as a portrait of a patient from La Salpêtrière, a hospital in France that treated women
suffering from 'nervous' conditions, and a portrait of Honey Boo Boo's mother, June Shannon. Through these portraits, I wish to create a personal archive that includes the multitudinous imagery we are bombarded with everyday, while also continuing to relate the past to the present. The progress of my recent work can be seen on my blog.
The artist's official entry into the art world took place in 1992 at Nicola Tyson's Trial Balloon 2 project space, New York, NY. Since that time, she has shown her work internationally and locally, having had solo exhibits at Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA, The Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, PA, and Johnson and Johnson World Headquarters in New Brunswick, NJ. Her paintings and drawings are in institutional and personal art collections; her art can be found in various journals, as well as in a survey of female artists published by Rizzoli International. The artist has been included in the 20th edition of Who's Who of American Women.
Elise Dodeles's work will be on view at The Quiet Life gallery, 17 South Main Street, Lambertville, NJ from April 25th-June 8th. An opening reception will take place on Sunday, May 4th beginning at 2 pm.
The Quiet Life gallery is open Wednesday-Sunday 11 am-5 pm. The phone number is 609-397-0880 and the website is http://www.quietlifegallery.com/
