NORTH SALEM, N.Y. – Outside it was gloomy and gray, but inside one North Salem space on a recent weekend, the inextricable relationship of nature to human creativity was helping restore the spirits of the winter weary.
Amid a kaleidoscope of colors on canvas and a bounty of blooms and bronzes at Lift Trucks Gallery, art aficionados mingled with champagne glasses in hand while they browsed works by — and schmoozed with — artists Domenica Brockman and Dorian Goldman.
Presiding over the garden party that Saturday afternoon were gallery director Kirk Rundhaug, a star in the real estate firmament, and Emily Hyatt, proprietor of Trove, an Aladdin’s cave of antiques temptingly located in the very next room.
Observing the action were the founder of the visual feast, American expressionist painter Tom Christopher, and his partner in cultural crime, local entrepreneur Dawn Christopher.
The couple has helped revitalize Croton Falls’ business district through various initiatives, including Lift Trucks Project, an art studio located in a former forklift factory on East Cross Street; a wine shop (now owned by the husband-and-wife team of Jonas Andersen and Natalie Marie Gehrels); and, more recently, Front Street’s reborn Hygrade Market, home to Milton’s, a restaurant/deli, and the Christophers’ own store, which is packed with oddities and artifacts.
Providing a much-needed taste of spring was floral designer Allison Newel, owner of North Salem’s historic June Farm.
She literally blanketed a table with a banquet of flowers, mosses, ivies, and other green goodness that cradled the platters of nibbles and bottles of beverages set out for guests.
Over the doorway to Trove, Newel had constructed an airy arch of pink blossoms. In another corner of the otherwise stark industrial space grew a spray of branches interspersed with enormous faux red roses.
Offering an artist’s eye view of it all, Christopher noted that the “whole show is about art and nature and the correlation between the two.”
He found it interesting that Rundhaug had chosen to bring in a floral designer.
“Flowers are regarded as high art in Japan and Paris, so I think it’s brilliant to combine them with paintings,” Christopher said, referencing Brockman’s jazz-like works in oil, hot wax, and collage that were on display.
Brockman has two very different styles of painting. Attracted to the logic of geometry, she distills that into bold, color-saturated abstracts.
Yet she’s also inspired by the natural world such as, Brockman says in her blog, “the effects of light on clouds in sunsets and the little rainbows that appear in gasoline spills on asphalt, or in soap bubbles.”
Oils of moonlight on water and landscapes filled an entire wall.
When asked to talk about the dual nature of her art, she borrowed from Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself,” which opined that people can have many different identities and characteristics that change over time.
Contradictions and complexities should not be evaded but embraced, she said.
“Well, I think we all contain multitudes,” explained Brockman, who feels that a lot of artists feel limited in what they can do or what they can show the world.
“I kind of decided that, at my age, I’m over that. I’m going to do everything that I want to do,” she said, adding that she was “very happy” to have been invited to show at Lift Trucks.
“Emily said, ‘We love everything. Bring it all,” Brockman said.
Equally in her element, sculptor Goldman describes herself as “a being who is most at home in nature, whether breathing cool, crisp air, planting a garden with my hands deep in the soil, or observing a seed pod crack and sprout triumphantly.”
She raises fruits, flowers, vegetables, and chickens, and keeps bees.
When not creating or cultivating, Goldman’s meditating, a practice that she says attunes her “to the oneness of the planet and the interconnectedness of all.”
Her work explores the ties between the body and forms in nature.
“I focus on the female figure as I can feel its connectedness to everything else. At one time we were all, both male and female, part of, embedded, and nurtured in the female torso,” she said in an online post.
The original version of “Twisted Torso,” one of the bronzes for sale at the gallery, was ceramic, an example of how things can evolve from one form to another.
Goldman has a master’s degree in sculpture from the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. After school, she taught while making and exhibiting her works.
(She lives in New York City where she and her husband raised three sons.)
“At some point, life kind of got in the way. I started juggling other things and sculpture fell behind a little bit,” she said, adding that it was always in her mind “to someday go back to it.”
Then a number of years ago, Goldman “realized that someday was now or never.”
Like the crocus that sleeps hidden under a blanket of snow only to emerge triumphant in the spring, that’s exactly what she did.
“There aren’t that many somedays left,” she said, not only enjoying the work itself but the chance for other people to see it.
Show attendees were thrilled about having a new cultural venue to visit.
Said one, Douglas Kim, who recently moved to Croton Falls: “I would say it’s an up-and-coming, artist-friendly community.”
North Salem, and other places in northern Westchester, has increased in popularity of late – especially in the post-COVID era.
Kim and his wife, a professional confectioner and body builder, attend church in Bedford where there’s been, he said, “an explosion of young people from New York City. It’s just been nonstop.”
He attributed that to “a whole combination of factors that are helping all these towns, propping them up.”
Calling the gallery space “elegant,” Laura Schmidt of Mahopac said she appreciated the combination of traditional art and natural displays.
“I’m going to walk around and enjoy the show,” she happily told Halston Media before taking her leave.
Christopher had previously summed things up with an anecdote about Jackson Pollock, who he recalled — with great fondness and admiration — as “the most inarticulate, drunken artist in the world.”
Famed for his radical drip paintings, volatile personality, and struggles with alcoholism, Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, were friends of the painter Hans Hofmann.
Noticing that Pollock’s paintings didn’t include still lives or models, Hofmann once suggested that he work from nature.
His oft-quoted response reflected a rejection of the idea of merely representing or duplicating what Mother Nature had already birthed.
He also was voicing – although not known to be a man of words – his desire to dig deeper into his own psyche.
“I am nature,” Pollock replied.