KEY WEST ARTIST IN SOLO ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST SHOW / Rosanne Potter Shares New Works With Hometown

The recent work of well-known Key West artist, Rosanne Potter, will be on display in Westfield, New Jersey, through the end of July. The one-woman show in the Internet Lounge of the Westfield Memorial Library includes new works (acrylics, oils, and pastels on canvas and oil pastels on paper) created in the past winter season in Key West, as well as two of the artist’s paintings familiar to Keys collectors.

Ms. Potter grew up in Westfield and attended Rosemont College.  During the spring of 1962, she participated in a semester abroad at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, Austria. This formative experience brought her in contact with the great art museums across Europe and, significantly, with the director of the Vienna program, American Abstract Expressionist painter, Clarence Giese.

The trip also led to major negative event in her life: toward the end of her semester in Vienna, she fell under the wheels of a streetcar, injuring her left leg so badly that it had to be amputated above the knee. Potter did not let this prevent her from completing her education and going on to have a serious career as a full Professor in English Literature and Women’s Studies at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.

Following her retirement from teaching in 1998 she and her husband, Bill McCarthy, a biographer and research scholar, began spending winters in Key West and summers in Westfield.  Potter regularly produces new works in both locations, but it was in Key West that she began serious study with the late Joe Loeber, known until his death last November as “the last living German Abstract Expressionist.”

Ms. Potter describes her own work as tending in three directions. “Some is purely abstract, non-representational, focused completely on shapes and colors with no attempt to create anything that ‘means’ anything but itself.” In this group she includes her displays of colors in stripes, curvilinear shapes, and blocks of color, some of them mixing rectilinear structures and curvilinear shapes.

Some she calls “Figures Emerging,” for although she doesn’t start with the intention to create bodies or faces, they emerge from the paint in ways that are mysterious to her. Sometimes shapes that have mythical significance also emerge: ships, skulls, mirrors, birds, animals, buildings, and planetary systems. Again these are not images that she has in mind and brings to the canvas; they are paint that forms itself into shapes that she can read and afterwards shape consciously if she chooses.

The final group consists of expressionist portraits. She notes, “Sometimes I begin with an intention to depict an actual person, but more often I paint mask-like faces that express moods. Those that are actual persons are my most worked and least intuitive paintings; those that are mask-like, at their best, achieve startling intensity.”

Ms. Potters new painting, “Blended Textures, Spring 2014” [shown above] is currently on display in the Studios of Key West’s Summer Salon show at the Armory on White St. This show runs until July 11, 2014, and is the last show that will be held in this location.  Her “Red Horse” [shown left] is included in the Florida Keys Council of the Arts Black, White & Read (the summer members show at the Gato Building); that show will be installed until September 30, 2014.

A previous solo show of Ms. Potter’s work was held at the Tropic Theater, in conjunction with the release of her poetry collection, Key West Transit of Venus – a book illustrated with her early paintings. Her works have also been shown in the Gramercy Neighborhood Association’s Annual Art Exhibit; National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, NYC; and in a group show, Degrees of Abstraction, at Agora Gallery, Chelsea (Manhattan).

The Westfield exhibit is on display Monday through Thursday 9:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., Friday 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (closed July 4-6 for Independence Day).