The Greenwich Arts & Library Association opened the exhibit “From Pollack to Pixels” in the Community Room of the Greenwich Free Library on Friday April 5.
The works are the creation of artists Judith Ellers, an artist and art professor since the 1980s, and her husband Art Brod, who took one art class in 1969 and had not touched a brush again until a couple years ago.
“My husband has always adored Jackson Pollack’s work,” Ellers said during the cheese-and-crackers affair at the library.
Where he dribbles paint from the sticks that most people stirs cans of paint with, she uses an iPad to create her work.
At RPI in the 1980s, she was an undergraduate working on a bachelor of fine arts who saw the design students using newly-created Macintosh computers (they premiered in 1984).
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“I was intrigued” by the artistic possibilities, she said, and she got permission to try to create art works on the computers. Her work was prints of her digital work.
A central focus of Brod’s work was his “American Farm Series.” The Pollack-esque works of dripped paint include a “recognizable focal point,” such as a solid color barn or cow. The dripped paint is enamel from American farm tractors, he said. The greens and yellows come from John Deere. The reds, International Harvester.
Ellers has lived in wester New York and South Carolina, but the landscape of the Adriondacks and surrounding areas is her inspiration.
“A lot of my work is landscape based,” she said. “Because I just love being here.”
Their friend, the well-known guitarist Marty Wendell, entertained the crowd of about a dozen or so people.
The GALA show — it’s the second for this “loose group of artists in the area” Ellers said — is on display at The Greenwich Free Library at 148 Main Street, Greenwich, NY, 12834.
G. Stephen Thurston is the managing editor of The Post-Star. He oversees the news room. Contact: 518-742-3225, sthurston@poststar.com.