I was really glad that I caught a show of paintings by Maine artist Colin Page at the F.A.N. Gallery here in Philadelphia. Yesterday was the last day of the show and I managed to fit it into my schedule to drop by the gallery. It was evidently a successful show as all but two of the paintings were marked as sold. (Personally, I think his work was underpriced.)

Page lives in Maine, but apparently has some Philadelphia connection. In addition to being represented by a gallery here, a number of his paintings, particularly those in this show, are of Philadelphia scenes.

Page has a loose, open style with lots of juicy brushstrokes and rich splashes of color defining his forms. What is unfortunately difficult to see in the relatively small images posted on his site, and on the sites of the galleries in Maine and Philadelphia that represent him, are the textured brushstrokes and areas of rough blending and broken color that make the surface of his paintings richly textured. (The recent images on the F.A.N. gallery site are a bit larger.)

Though he occasionally paints landscapes, particularly of rocky coastal scenes in Maine, he more often paints cityscapes, townscapes and interiors, finding his compositions in the geometry of buildings and objects as well as in the negative spaces they define.

Page has a great talent for simplifying his compositions to just the right degree to leave them strongly graphic but visually rich. He leaves the surfaces of his subjects briefly noted, instead letting the application of the areas of paint provide visual as well as physical texture.

You’ll find a variety of his work on his own site and the three galleries listed below.

[Links and suggestion courtesy of Deirdre Tessmann and Elek Hendrickson]

Visionary artist Martina Hoffmann was born in Germany, grew up in Cameroon in West Africa, and now lives in Spain with her husband, artist Robert Venosa, who I profiled last week.

She paints intricate, detailed works inspired by dreams and the unconscious, which makes it appropriate to call her work surreal, in spite of how picky I can be about the indiscriminate use of that term. Her pieces often involve themes of fertility, pregnancy, birth and other invocations of the universal feminine, as well as suggestions of altered stares of consciousness or spiritual awakening.

She shares with Venosa a kinship to the liquid-reality visions of Surrealists Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst and Dali, and a fascination with the combination of imagined forms with traditional landscape elements. In her case there is also often an incorporation of intricate patterns, suggestive of radiant spiritual or biological energy, surrounding, or emanating from, living things, that brings to mind the work of Alex Grey.

Hofffmann also has a fascinating series of portraits, in which there is a suggestion of other-worldliness or spitiruality to the backgrounds and settings.

There is a gallery of her work on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective; and along with Venosa, she is one of the artists featured in their new collection Metamorphosis, which I wrote about in this post.

There is also a gallery of her work on the Society for the Art of Imagination, along with a bio and interview.

Addendum: I received a notice that Martina Hoffmann and Robert Venosa are conducting a series of workshops on Visionary Painting, the latest of which will be held this November 24th to 30th in Boulder, Colorado.