AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

http://www.robinross.com
http://greenoasisgarden.net/gaiasring.aspx

Login and say hello to this month's Featured AMP Members, Robin Ross and Noah Baen. Robin and Noah are a fantastic artist couple who live in Brooklyn, New York, with their dogs Maylene and Artie. Both original AMPers who joined in AMP's beginning days in January 2006, before the website was even open, Robin and Noah hosted AMP's first New York party in their loft last June. Both outstanding artists, they are also outstandingly hospitable. An afternoon with Robin, Noah, Maylene and Artie is one of my favorite things in New York City.

Robin Ross

Sometimes, drawing and painting in various old books, I combine my love of the literary
and visual arts. Often the old paper, the smell, the touch and the literariness of
description and knowledge inspire what I paint, and also what I paint may evoke
writing from me. I work with the poetry of journeying through an unknown land with
visions of realistic desert and illusionary fountains, and give each book new life. It is
like a song to me. I read or merely imagine the page's content - the intent of the
original author, and or the publisher's interpretation. I can integrate some writing
here, some painting there. A book is like a giant installation of paintings and words, a
compilation of individual yet cohesive pages, and can contain many many paintings. Each
original page is inclusive to what I am painting. It folds, it opens, it makes crisp or crinkly noises, and conveys a history below the surface of the new story I put upon it. Some day perhaps another creative person will chronicle more upon what I have created. The changing nature of the paper and print underneath the actual oil paint is part of the character of each book. The slow and quiet ephemeral quality of these books adds to their mystery and depth. Sometimes other, I work in oil on canvas referencing my mystical relationship with the animal and spirit world. In this work I try to capture the spiritual content of humanity's quest for truths. How do we fit into the largeness of our world, with our ethereal bodies as mist, emerging bursts unexplainable by hard science, what grounds
us to stay earthbound? The work is heavily layered and glazed, with words and colors
scratched into an atmosphere of intensity creating both physical depth and deep radiance. While working, I go back and forth between conversations and quietude that have been exchanged between me and whoever's "portrait" I am painting. I often take many
photographs of each subject and may or may not use these as reference also. Recognizable figures appear. The relationship of the animal and spirit world form a balancing act between what we see, and what we imagine, poised between the reality of the sciences and the wisdom of the mystics. Always I aspire to have the resulting glow transform each painting into dreamtime.

Noah and I recently had a two person exhibit together at North Main Gallery in Salem, NY.
We've shown together several times, and always learn to reimagine ourselves as the
marriage between heaven and earth. I will be exhibiting at Tribes Gallery in New York beginning Feb. 2 in a
two-person show entitled "Being In A Lone Space", and also in "Eight Artists Eight
Books" opening Feb. 7 at 5plus5 Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.

Noah Baen

I am a visual artist focused on Nature and the relation of humans to the natural environment. My primary art form is site-specific installation, constructed with living plants, and gathered plant material and found objects found at or near the site. My installations, which are mostly ephemeral, may be sited outdoors as well as in indoor gallery and museum settings. The beauty, energy and metaphorical potential of the cycles of nature as found in wild, weedy, common and overlooked plants and places are some of my primary inspirations. My work evolves from an ongoing dialog with the particular site and the life present there. In "Another Autumn's Rhythms," my part of "The Marriage of Heaven and Earth," a two person show this fall with Robin, structures made with branches and plant tops gathered in local fields wove through the gallery, between Robin's paintings, arched up to a plate glass window and spilled out from the window onto Salem's Main Street. Over six weeks the green leaves turned brown, goldenrod blossoms became seed heads and green milkweed pods lost color, opened and were releasing fluffy seeds by the exhibit's close. One of my current projects is "Gaia's Ring," a year-long installation with volunteer plants, i.e., weeds, at Green
Oasis Community Garden in New York's East Village.

Two more installations can be seen at http://safetgallery.com/NoahBaen/ChloroplasmicWriteup.html and http://www.wavehill.org/arts/natureindoorsfortheholidays.html.

My work also embraces painting and drawing. It has been exhibited widely and is included in the collections of the Smith College Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. It can also be seen in the 59th Street subway concourse and community gardens in New York City. As a community artist, I have directed a number of collaborative public and site-specific projects including murals, garden designs and landscape reclamation. As an art educator I have led the Family Art Project at Wave Hill, the world-renowned public garden and cultural center in the Bronx since 1990 and conducted numerous art-in-education residencies.