Hester Simpson in her studio.
VCCA Fellows Return to Le Moulin à Nef
Residency season at VCCA’s Moulin à Nef in Auvillar, France, officially started on September 27 with the arrival of Hester Simpson, our first Fellow in residence there since December of 2019!
Hester, a visual artist from New York, NY, says that she feels like a princess! She is definitely a shutterbug, she has been taking beautiful photos of the spectacular Auvillar countryside in all its fall glory.
Eugene Gloria, a writer from Greencastle, IN, arrived on Monday for his second residency at le Moulin à Nef. He was last here in the fall of 2013. It is wonderful to welcome him back!
Visit to The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation
August 13, 2020 | 5:30pm – 6:30pm
In celebration of the Figge’s 15th anniversary, join us for an exclusive virtual tour of the William Louis-Dreyfus Collection. The tour will include an overview of the collection with Christina Kee and Mary Anne Costello from The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, as well as interviews with artists Hester Simpson and John Newman.
With over 3,500 works of art assembled by a businessman and poet, this unique collection includes works by European, American and international artists; by well-established figures and those at the beginnings of their career; by those embraced by the mainstream, and by those categorized by the term “self-taught.”
William Louis-Dreyfus said that art should, somehow, “be in praise of the world.” It is clear from the stylistic range he acquired over the years that it is not the idea of technique or rendering that is being referred to, rather to an artistic attitude – that rare combination of courage and receptivity needed to translate the external world into image form.
See interview with Hester Simpson here.
VCCA Fellowship
Hester Simpson has been granted a Residency from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) from January – February 2019.
One of the leading artists communities in the world with locations in Amherst, Virginia and Auvillar, France, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) has as its mission advancing the arts by providing creative space in which our best national and international writers, visual artists and composers produce their finest creative work.
Each year, VCCA hosts over 400 Fellow-artists at Mt. San Angelo in central Virginia and 40 Fellow-artists at the Moulin à Nef in France. The artists who come to VCCA are selected by a peer review jury on the basis of the important or innovative work they are doing in their respective fields.
Surface & Substance Exhibition at The Painting Center
Curated by Hester Simpson
Exhibition Dates: January 2 – 27, 2018
The Painting Center presents Surface & Substance featuring ten contemporary artists. At once ordinary and intimate, the relationship that accrues between artists and their respective mediums evinces practical considerations relating to material properties, as well as the embodiment of distinct aesthetic purviews.
With Surface & Substance, curator and painter Hester Simpson highlights this dynamic by focusing on ten artists for whom surfaces are responses to a world of shifting values and chaotic changes. Paul Behnke, Elisa D’Arrigo, Shane Drinkwater, Daniel G. Hill, Elizabeth Knowles, Mario Naves, Carol Salmanson, Mary Schiliro, Jane Schiowitz and Simpson herself alternately emphasize the rough-hewn and the seamless, the casual and the resolute. In doing so, they channel currents of the broader culture even as they hone their own peculiar visions.
Simpson cites cultural observers who have linked changes in the surfaces of artworks to socio-political currents and cultural upheaval. The artist and historian Jonathan Janson writes of how a “rough manner exposes the working processes to the spectator making him party to the artifice to which the illusion is achieved.” More refined approaches to paint-handling endow illusion with an overriding clarity and precision. Both approaches can exist simultaneously and, as such, offer different interpretations of the world in which they were created. And so it is with the artists featured in Surface & Substance. They give body to the extraordinary — and extraordinarily swift — changes taking place in contemporary life.
