Nan Ring’s These Almost Lost Things
105 Grove Street, Montclair, NJ
Closes: August 16, 2024
“In every moment, this moment,” said artist, poet Nan Ring on her current one-woman multimedia exhibit. “A past work is just as alive to me as the day I made it, hence this show.”
A compelling interpreter of beauty in the transience of all earthly things, Nan Ring is celebrating over 40 years in the arts with These Almost Lost Things, a 68-piece, partial retrospective now running at the BrassWorks Gallery. (Directions and hours below). The site-specific, immersive installation offers both paintings from 1979 to the present and her current poems.
Judging from responses at the exhibition’s early April opening, art lovers are celebrating, too.
A complete retrospective would require a curator with the clout and deep pockets to ply her earlier pieces from their current homes in multiple institutional, corporate and personal holdings.
Ring, now an ageless 67, has been recognized since her art student days. She is cum laude graduate of Syracuse University School of Visual and Performing arts and received a Master’s of Fine Art in Painting from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Honors and accolades have accumulated with numerous prestigious grants, awards and fellowships in painting and drawing and artist-in-residences nationwide. Her works have long been exhibited in top East Coast group shows.
Ring is recently back from her 13th or so return as an Artist-in-Residence in painting and writing at Millay Arts, the former home of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, among the first female Pulitzer winners.
Ring’s visual work has haunted me since reviewing a 2011 three-woman show which she curated at the long-shuttered New Jersey Arts Incubator in West Orange. Then, as now, Ring was a “vessel for the power of subtlety and the value of introspection.”
Ours is a culture of shock, of frantic quest for the new, for influence, for the monetization of human feeling. Hers is a world of the eternal, the essential. She paints what it is to love. She paints quiet, resonance. She paints emotion. She paints truth.
“I pour my heart and soul into my work,” Ring said during an on-site interview and exhibit preview.
Same with her words. The author of the 1996 acclaimed memoir Walking on Walnuts (Bantam Books), the title in part riffs on her early-on day job as a pastry chef at two- and three-starred New York City restaurants.
BRASSWORKS GALLERY
First, a few words about BrassWorks Gallery. Housed in a sensitively restored and repurposed, low-slung 1930s brass etched-work factory, the building is now commercial space, including the offices of its creator Robert Silver and his Bravitas Group. For nearly 20 years, Silver has been fulfilling his and wife Rhonda Silver’s shared vision of both rescuing historic buildings and creating community art spaces. The gallery exhibit space travels through three appropriately lit corridors that form a U leading from the building’s inner entryway.
Ring’s exhibit was created in partnership with Bravitas Group Graphic Designer and Art Coordinator Cheryl Minden. Kudos to Minden for this beautifully conceived and sensitively mounted show. Ring calls herself an intimast. Minden gathers intimate, conversational groupings that speak to one another and to us.
The show roughly follows the inspirations informing Ring’s work from now — highlighting her current and largest exhibit piece (Salt Kitchen: A Mighty Woman, 2023) — and traveling backwards in time to earlier still lifes (including the arresting Corn at Rest 3, 2009). Salt Kitchen tilts with abstraction. The still lifes wink at 17th-century European inspirations. Both are tribute to hard working women “worth their salt.”
Rings’ visual and written works metamorphize the corridors into metaphorical passages–hallways through palatable time—past, present, future. Time infuses each image, gives weight to each word. Abstract or figurative, monotone or filled with color, low or high key, oil or pastel or watercolor or acrylic or charcoal–time is the essence. So, too with the poems: Printed in Perpetua on paper which evokes both canvas and the pages of old books, the fragments shift into objects to be seen. The visual works are metaphoric poems to be read, reread, remembered. (Copies of the complete poems demarcate the conclusion of each exhibit section.)
THE POEMS
Fragments from four of Ring’s incisive, multipage biographical/autobiographical poems introduce each of the phases of her visual works. The poems wear a feminist mantle. With vivid directness and imagery, she contrasts the need to make art, to be known, with centuries of women’s subsidiary place in both the greater world and the establishment art world. She asks, Who is seen? and answers the celebrated male painter Giorgio Morandi. She asks, Who is not seen? His contemporary, futurist painter Benedetta Cappa, and the posthumously discovered photographer Vivian Maier. She exposes Whose life is known? The 19th century writer Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil who presciently donned both a male name, George Sand, and male garb to be recognized, and Whose life is not known? Clara Peeters whose 17th-century Dutch still lifes are celebrated while the facts of her life are lost to neglect.
An excerpt from Bird, 2024 by Nan Ring:
and Amantine pecked her way out,
emerged George Sand,
in male plumage, free to write,
free to publish. Cigar beak,
tuxedo tails. Got the last laugh.
Bird…
THE ART
You may not reach enlightenment from Nan Ring’s sublime visual art. Then again, you might.
A master of multiple mediums, Ring has formidable technical chops. Her studio is where other artists housed in East Orange Manufacturers Village converge to learn about both 17th-century glazes—she will apply multiple layers, each taking 24 hours to dry to achieve a depth of light—and the newest development in acrylics. During the Village’s Fall Open Studio Days artists and admirers crowd to discuss her latest works.
But what good technique unless in service of a larger vision? A superb draftsman, she may choose to merely suggest a foot that says a lot about adolescent, tentative strides into the world (Gaze to Sea, 2021). Gaze is the emotional culmination of a suite of deeply felt works chronicling Ring the mother and Ring the artist observing son Max (now an adult and a Memphis-based musician) from birth to this young man, scanning the horizon for his place in the world.
I especially like Max Digging, 2012. Max, the child playing, fills the lower, right quadrant of the painting. Much of the canvas of his life is empty save for a luminescent light—a painting of a moment in a life yet to be limned.
Or the artist may choose the exquisite realism and enigma of one of my long favorite Ring works, the charcoal pencil Degas’ Dancer’s Skirt, 2011.
If the many Max paintings are beginnings, Ring’s self-portrait, the powerful oil on canvas As Father Lay Dying, 2011, paints ending. “I teach at a secondary school. The counselor said, Nan, you have to paint your grief.” A black shadow engulfs the left side of the canvas, a truncated Ring is partially seen against a sepia panel, looking out, looking in, looking back, looking forward.
“I am interested in the presence of things, the psychological weight,” Ring said.
Rings lives in the metaphoric and there are always multiple interpretations. Is the 6 by 6-inch oil, Nanny’s Bathing Costume, 2023, a poignant memory or a memento mori or a quiet tribute to a courageous woman? All these and more. Ring’s works have layers, possibilities. Again, they are conversations.
“I want to hear what viewers think, what they say, what they bring to my work,” Ring said. “I want them to write their own narratives.”
While Ring draws back the curtains of the mundane, veils and masks and transparencies are recurrent tropes. Nothing is accidental. All is balanced, all is beautiful, but still there are decisions. Working at home during lock-down, are her pale palette, smaller works of isolation, entrapment, of spaces closing in on abject figures as in Interior, 2024 or In Winter, 2021, both in gouache. “I created the interiors, then later decided they needed the figures,” Ring said.
Post pandemic, Nan burst into vivid color. I asked about the reds and oranges and the pink. “It’s not Barbie pink. I have always loved pink. When I could return to the studio, I said, ‘Nan, you are a painter. Paint color.’” The three 2024 works in acrylic, Child in Veil, Self Portrait in Veil and JB in Veil, prompted a discussion of veils, masks.
“I finished them and had the impulse to paint over the eyes. I uncovered the eyes, then covered them many times,” Ring said.
In Child and Self Portrait it’s an opaque mask. In the third it’s a veil. The child seeing but not understanding, a hand covering a child’s eyes to shelter it a little longer from harsh contemporary reality? The artist shielding her eyes from our world? When she reveals the eyes in JB in Veil, they are closed, looking inward in a portrait of introspection.
Ring both offers the shifting light of a trio of abstracted Cape Cod seemingly floating water color and gouache landscapes (I hope they sell together) Landscape, Landscape 2, Landscape 3, 2023, and the material solidity, the physical and emotional weight of a tour de force skillet grounded on her kitchen counter.
The skillet evokes generations of the women who cooked before her. (Cast Iron Pan, 2011). She poises a halved butternut squash just over the edge of the kitchen counter, seemingly headed for her toes—simultaneously weightless and grounded and among her slyest pieces. (Squash, oil, 2009.)
Ring is a story teller with many stories left for the viewer to discover and tell for themselves The exhibit is free, no one disturbs you and with a few viewings to date, I am anticipating more. It’s only early April.
Let this excerpt again from Bird, Nan Ring, 2024, serve as coda:
Now I give up
the pigment to the water, the broken
egg shells to the garden, my youth
to the wind
Still, the act of creation is forever young.
LEARN MORE
DIRECTIONS
The BrassWorks Gallery at 105 Grove Street in Montclair is open through August 16 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays. Evenings and weekends are by appointment, email Nan Ring to arrange a private viewing. Please leave your contact number for inquiries or when requesting an appointment.
The BrassWorks Factory building is accessed through the first driveway immediately north of the Montclair NJ Transit Train Tracks, behind Town Auto. Watch closely for the #105 sign to your right and drive to the rear of the property. Handicap Accessible once inside double set of front doors. Arriving by NJ Transit from NYC? The Walnut Street Station is within walking distance.
MEET THE ARTIST
Nan Ring is participating in the inaugural, multiple site Garden State Art Weekend, a free state-wide arts weekend April 19-21:
She will be at BrassWorks Galley on Saturday, April 20, 12 p.m.-4 p.m.
She will be in her studio during East Orange Manufacturers Village Spring Open House on Sunday, April 21, 12-6PM, Building 1, Studio B. Details can be found here.
Learn more about the mission of the Bravitas Group and their many gallery events at their website.
Nan’s life partner, author Richard Fulco, and she host literary readings and events at Fulco’s independent book store, Big Red Reads at 120 Main Street in Nyack, New York.
