MARVIN BILECK and EMILY NELLIGAN
Cranberry Island: Drawings and Prints

May 5 through June 17, 2005
Reception for the artists Saturday, May 14, from 1 to 3 pm
Catalogue with text by Alison Ferris available May 13

The gallery is pleased to announce Marvin Bileck and Emily Nelligan: Cranberry Island Drawings and Prints. This exhibition will explore the work of two artists, each of whom has been inspired for over fifty years by the same atmospheric and once remote island off the Maine coast near Mount Desert. The show will consist of twenty drawings and prints by Bileck and twenty drawings by Nelligan. Most date from the past two decades.

Landscape is the sole subject of Bileck’s (b. 1920) and Nelligan’s (b. 1924) art. With both, their expression is realized on modestly sized paper, but for each, the interests and effects are dramatically different. Bileck’s medium is line, both in his etchings and engravings and his drawings. His delicate, intricate, yet clearly delineated marks describe tangible, rugged forms such as fallen trees, rocky outcroppings and dense gnarled thickets. The specifics of contour, form and texture are predominant and his work owes a debt in equal measure both to Northern European and to Japanese traditions. Although his drawings are sometimes completed in a sitting, Bileck’s print plates are reworked over years, often resulting in each subsequent impression being unique variants of increased nuance, richness and complexity.

By contrast, Nelligan, using only unfixed charcoal and erasure on sheets of paper conventionally used for letter writing, creates potent, moody and emotionally charged drawings of changing light, shifting space and atmosphere. Although always grounded in the direct observation of the island, shore and sea, they often have the look of pure abstraction. In describing her work, a contemporary of Nelligan’s has written, “(Her) charcoal drawings are charged with near-mystical intensity. They speak of the melancholy resignation of prolonged solitude. They have the quiet concentration of meditation.” Deborah Weisgall, in reviewing a 2000 exhibition of Nelligan’s at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, has written that “. . . they hang like sudden windows, instants of light and air translated into black and white.” She continues, “If Ms. Nelligan’s subject is the moment in its infinite variable, she also draws permanence: a summer place apart from chronology, where time is measured by seasons, tides and changing light.”

Both Bileck and Nelligan attended the Cooper Union, where they met in the 1940s. They lived together for years in New York and spend part of each summer and fall on Great Cranberry Island. In addition to drawing and printmaking, Bileck has worked as an illustrator. His titles include Walker in the City and Rain Makes Applesauce, which was awarded a Caldecott Honor.

This show marks the first New York exhibition of their work since the 1970s.

To preview this exhibition, access images and texts please visit .
For further information and images contact Ellen Robinson at [email protected]. UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:
Summer Landscapes: A Group Exhibition of Work by Gallery Artists: July and August.
Neil Welliver: A Memorial Exhibition: September/October 2005.
William King: Early Sculpture: October/November 2005.