Rider Art Gallery Hosts Rita Baragona and St. Clair Sullivan: A Marriage of Two Minds
Rider University will host an exhibit of recent paintings by New Jersey artists Rita Baragona and St. Clair Sullivan entitled Rita Baragona and St. Clair Sullivan: A Marriage of Two Minds from November 6 to December 7 in the Rider University Art Gallery, located on the second floor of the Bart Luedeke Center. The exhibit will open with a reception on Thursday, November 6, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Art Gallery, and the husband-and-wife artists will again meet patrons for a Gallery Talk on Thursday, November 13, at 7 p.m.
Baragona and Sullivan have been living and painting together since they met as students at the New York Studio School nearly 40 years ago. They fell in love at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, holding hands in front of Chardin’s Soap Bubbles and Renoir’s great portrait of Mme. Charpentier and Her Children. They went on to have sons of their own, while continuing to paint, to show their work in and around New York, and to haunt the museums. Baragona and Sullivan are firmly united in their devotion to the great painters of the Western tradition, but also in their love of the light in the world around them. They both study nature to understand the effects of light, and for both of them, the primary point of painting is achieving radiance or luminosity.
With such common purpose and life experience, you might expect look-alike paintings, but that is hardly the case. Baragona’s paintings find radiance in color. They are bright, light-filled, immediate notations of her sensations in front of still lifes and landscapes. His landscapes, on the other hand, have strong tonal underpinnings, are painstakingly detailed, and achieve their radiance with the accumulation of many small touches.
Whereas Baragona always works from direct observation, Sullivan uses photographs for reference, as well as direct observation. Visitors to Rita Baragona and St. Clair Sullivan: A Marriage of Two Minds will see two very different approaches to painting by two artists who are devoted to each other and to each other’s art, who understand intimately what the other is driving at, and who live to support the other’s efforts.
Rita Baragona has had numerous one-person exhibitions at the Bowery Gallery in New York, Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, the Washington Art Association in Connecticut, and East Stroudsburg University and the Dutot Museum, both in Pennsylvania. Selected group shows include Lori Bookstein Gallery, Kouros Gallery, Borgenicht Gallery and Midtown Payson Gallery, all in New York; the Noyes Museum in New Jersey; the Well Street Gallery in Alaska; Rider University in New Jersey; Lyme Academy in Connecticut; Tallahassee Gallery in Florida; Bryn Mawr College and Allentown Museum in Pennsylvania; and the Baltimore Museum. Jed Perl wrote in Art in America of Baragona’s work, “What a nature painter must do is to impose some human logic or private poetry on the natural world. By this measure, Baragona is a very interesting painter.”
St. Clair Sullivan’s one-person exhibits include the Kornblee Gallery in New York, the Bachelier-Cardonsky Gallery in Kent, Conn., Sussex County Community College and the Wyckoff Gallery, both in New Jersey, and the Academy Gallery in New Orleans. Selected New Jersey group shows include the Noyes Museum, Jersey City Museum, the National Academy of Design, and Fairleigh Dickinson University. He has received two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship Grants.
Rita Baragona and St. Clair Sullivan: A Marriage of Two Minds is funded in part by a grant from the Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Department of State.
The Rider University Art Gallery is open Tuesday to Thursday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.
