First Annual Artist Spotlight at Mills Pond House Gallery featuring Barbara Bilotta

John Mitty Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Smithtown Township Arts Council is pleased to present the First Annual “Artist Spotlight” featuring the work of a Long Island Artist. This year’s exhibition in the Mills Pond House Gallery will feature the work of Mount Sinai artist Barbara Bilotta. The exhibit opens September 27 and continues through October 11. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, September 28, 2-5 pm. The public is invited to meet the artist and view her work. Mills Pond House Gallery parking is off Mills Pond Road in St. James. GPS to 199 Mills Pond Rd. Our driveway is directly across from the two whit stone pillars. Call 631-862-6575 or visit www.stacarts.org for further information.

This annual exhibition is sponsored by Gold Coast Bank and Holiday Inn Express Stony Brook who share our vision of creative enterprise. We believe that supporting Long Island’s creative industries and promoting the talents of artists who live and work on Long Island has the potential to boost our local economy and lay a foundation for creative enterprise here on Long Island. A portion of the proceeds from sale of artwork will go directly to Stony Brook Children’s Hospital.

Barbara Bilotta considers herself an Abstract Expressionist, and her vibrant paintings certainly have the visual and emotional power that is so much a part of that school of painting. The striking abstract patterns in her works are more than just arrangements of colors and shapes. Her love of nature animates those patterns, forging a connection between pure abstraction and organic forms. Thanks to that link, a flowing arrangement of colors will also evoke the textures found in a rock’s surface or a body of water. There is an elemental strength in her images that grounds them, setting up a contrast with the artist’s dynamic use of colors and shapes. “My goal,” she says, “is to transform the natural order into a suggestive interpretation to stimulate the imagination.”

Much of that interpretation is rooted in Bilotta’s color palette. “I love everything that is brilliant and incredible,” she says, “and I attempt to incorporate it into my work.” This transmits itself through the bright blues, glowing yellows and intense reds that often punctuate her images, drawing the viewer’s eye into the patterns she creates. But the painter also expertly uses a whole range of subtler shades, rendering soft fields of pastel color that fade into white, or areas of rich browns and blacks. She says that one of her aims is to bring out “a beautiful interplay of light and shadows,” and is it is this which gives her images a palpable sense of physicality, even at their most abstract.

The surface of Bilotta’s paintings is also the result of an intriguing contrast. She works mostly in acrylics glazed with resin, and notes that the acrylic’s softness and the resin’s hardness combine to create a “charged atmospheric space” in which the viewer is made to feel the movement of the paint. That sensation pulls us strongly into her works, and makes the world she depicts a highly compelling one.

STAC, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, is supported by Town of Smithtown and the National Endowment for the Arts (AEAC Initiative)  Public Funding provided by Suffolk County

jmitty@longislandyellowpages.com

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