Permanently Closed as of 12/31/2023
80-1 Lyme Street · Old Lyme, CT 06371
Linda Hoffman
Linda Hoffman has been part of the New England artist community since the early1980’s. Her art includes indoor and outdoor sculpture, public installations, digital prints, three chapbooks of poetry and the Fine Art letterpress book, Winter Air. Hoffman’s work is in the collections of Harvard University, the Boston Public Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, NY, Hechinger Tool Museum, DC, and in the Towns of Wellesley, Groton, and Acton, MA; and in Littleton, NH. She is the orchardist at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio in Harvard and curator of the farm’s annual outdoor sculpture exhibit. She blogs on Apples, Art, and Sprit at www.lindahoffman.com/blog.
DAVID BORRUS
By day, welding is the skill David has used to earn a living. His welds conform to the straight lines and right angles of I-beams and concrete. Often he was so focused on the fierce tip of the electrode that he failed to notice the magnificent human and mechanical symphony of the job site happening all around him.
At night in his studio, he can weld figures which express the complex curves and stances of daily life. He can work his TIG torch to create musculature, instruments, and motion. Essentially, he layers beads of molten metal (bronze or steel) in the same way that clay is built up in modeling sculpture. Later he uses a series of grinders to carve, shape, and finish each piece.
Over the past 30 years, he has tried other mediums, but he enjoys working in steel and bronze the best. The internal strength of these materials allows him to capture that instant when a musician is bent over backward to reach a high note in the “midnight ramble” or a gymnast swerving and twisting on the pommel horse. He continues to work in steel and bronze because he really enjoys welding. He likes the “arcing and sparking” of the grinders and electrodes and the smooth patterns of the orange liquid metal as it follows the blue tip of his torch.
His works include dancers, musicians, athletes, construction workers, and
Judaica. He studied foundry and mold-making techniques at Massachusetts College of Art, and has worked steadily in the marine construction industry as a diver, welder and pile driver for over 30 years. He creates his sculptures in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he and his wife Amy have lived and raised their two sons, Sam and Gabriel, since 1994.
Conrad Levenson
I salvage scrap materials and obsolete objects, repurposing and recomposing them as works of art, while combining previously unrelated elements in unusual and unexpected ways.
My sculptures evoke the former times, places, lives, unique character, and the embedded energy of their source materials. I tell their stories, as I explore and mediate the essential relationship between their form and content.
Ranging in size from the intimate to large scale installations, my sculptures are displayed indoors and out, often in spaces and settings of my own design. Individual works, series, and commissions are included in many private collections and outdoor public exhibitions.
Margaret Roleke
Margaret Roleke is a contemporary mixed media artist based in Connecticut. In 2020 she was awarded a Connecticut Commission on the Arts and was also awarded grants for public art projects at Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven and the Town Green District in New Haven.
Roleke has had solo exhibits at Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, Pen+Brush Gallery NewYork, NY, AHA Fine Art New York, NY, and Norwalk Community College, Norwalk, CT among others. Her work has been included in shows at The Aldrich, Katonah Museum of Art, Art Space New Haven, ODETTA Gallery and Ethan Cohen (Kube) and other venues. Roleke has participated in art fairs including Spring Break, Pulse, Scope, Governor’s Island, Cutlog, Flux, 14c, Fountain and Verge.
Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, ArtNet, Art Scope, the New York Times and other publications. She has been an artist in residence at Elmhurst Sculpture Garden, Queens, NY and Weir Farm, Wilton, Connecticut. Roleke has also curated exhibits in Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Haven, and Ridgefield, Connecticut and written for Culture Catch and Women's Art Magazine.
Chandler Davis
Chandler Davis is a gentle, unassuming soul. He is a missionary for the natural world and all things of the sea. He built an international reputation as an artist with his large scale mollusk sculptures. Chandler’s nautili, conches and mussels, rendered at “human” scale, are significant. A gargantuan mussel at eye level commands consideration and that is exactly what Chandler wants.
Richard Goulis
Goulis is a multimedia and performance artist who has been a fixture on the local art scene since he first arrived in Providence in 1980 to study at RISD. He has been performing with Big Nazo puppet troupe since 1987, is a founding member of Empire Revue, AS220’s monthly variety show, and contributes to NetWorks, a video art project that documents Rhode Island’s creative community. Despite his prolific artistic output, however, this sculpture is Goulis’ first public installation since 1983.
Condemned is more than a decade in the making. Twelve years ago, Goulis planted two trees in his backyard six feet apart. As they grew to a height of about four feet, he began bending them toward each other, tying their branches together with velcro and string. Over the course of a dozen springs and summers, they grew to twelve feet and became entwined in a graceful embrace.
That was when Goulis began his next phase of turning trees into art. He bound the leaves with wire and coated the entire surface – leaves, branches, trunk – in a thick coat of polymer resin. After the coating had cured, he cut the two trees at ground level and built stands to make them transportable in their original configuration.
The irony of the act is not lost on the artist. “I nurtured these trees for more than a decade and then cut them down and turned them into art,” he exclaims. “It was a difficult thing to do because I loved the process of training them into position each year and seeing them grow. I felt a little sad at first, but I realized that the power did not diminish when I cut them. They transformed, helping me to create a powerful statement about how we control our environment sometimes at the detriment of ourselves.”
JOE GITTERMAN
Joe Gitterman has sculpted for 50+ years yet it wasn’t until he retired from Wall Street that he devoted his full time to his art. Since his first exhibition at a local Connecticut gallery in 2011, Joe Gitterman’s career has taken off. His work has been bought by both private and corporate collections and he has received commissions from Robert Couturier, Norwegian Cruise Lines, The Riverside Building in London, the Robert A.M. Stern-designed Arris building in Washington D.C. and the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston, among many others.
Gitterman creates abstract sculptures inspired by movement such as ballet and modern dance. Gitterman states, “I thought about the movements of the dancers as a series of frames in an old celluloid film, and how just one of those frames could convey a fantastic sense of motion. I thought that capturing this ‘single frame of motion’ in a solid piece of sculpture would be a wonderful challenge.”
Sculpting models in copper, wax or acrylic, Gitterman chooses to cast in bronze or fabricate in stainless steel. The surface texture and color of each piece accentuates features such as sensual form or the suggestion of dynamic movement. Whether rendered in clean, crisp stainless-steel, vibrant color, or the leathery patina of bronze each abstraction and gesture references the fluidity of form and motion. Gitterman does not make editions thus each of his works is an original.
Domenico Belli
I have been creating primitive and modern sculptures from reclaimed steel for several years now. I like to challenger myself with different subjects and sizes.....flower, animal and abstract modern sculptures. My skills of heating, bending and welding metals all give different spectacular results. The skill coupled with my passion for excellence and integrity into designing metal and shaping into an art form is appreciated and valued by my clients.
Ernesto Leal
Ernesto Leal, native to El Paso, Texas, learned to sculpt the figure at Lyme Academy of Fine Arts. After graduating from the Academy, he continued to study on his own from old masters drawings and references associated with the figure. His work in sculpture began with small miniature pieces of sleeping animals and people. Although drawing is his foundation for sculpture and painting, sculpture continues to be his greatest joy and challenge.
Artist Statement
My work in art still remains very closely associated with classical figurative sculptures. My drawings and paintings are much different; they delve into biomorphic shapes and figures. Sculpture provides me a more constructed and methodical approach to expressing my thoughts and emotions. Sculpture isn’t very forgiving; meaning that if I make a mistake it won’t be easy to hide or workaround, so from the beginning to the end the completion of a sculpture is very challenging and tedious for me. I feel it is very necessary for me to complete this form of art to continue to hone my skills in drawing and painting.
R. Douglass Rice
R. Douglass Rice was born in La Jolla, California in 1952. He grew up in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. In 1968 his family moved to San Francisco, California. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy where he took his first sculpture class with Richard Lyman. He attended Stanford University where he studied sculpture with Richard Randall and earned a degree in Human Biology in 1974. He also studied painting at the Mendocino Art Center, San Francisco State University and the School for Visual Arts in New York.
In 1987 Rice moved with his family to New York and raised their two children in New York City’s Soho District. He worked in his high end residential company from 1987 to 2015. During this same time, Rice maintained a studio in Tribeca. He has exhibited in numerous galleries over the last thirty years, including two shows at the National Arts Club. After his second show there in 2008, he was invited to become a member and continues to serve on the club’s Round Table committee.
Rice was a board member of the Bronx Museum of the Arts for ten years and served as its chair from 2009 until 2013. He is currently Chair Emeritus of the museum.
In 2016 Rice moved to Stonington, Connecticut. He now paints and sculpts full time and shows at local museums and galleries.
He is currently an Elected Artist at the Mystic Museum of Art and a member of the Lyme Arts Association, the Bristol Art museum and Artist Co-op Gallery of Westerly.
Michael Lonchar
I consider myself an interdisciplinary artist. I’ve worked extensively within the mediums of film, photography, sculpture, woodworking, performance, sound, and installation. For the past few years I have focused on combining film, sound, and installation as I’ve found these to be the most emotionally impactful and exciting to create. My personal experience with Bipolar Disorder is the conceptual basis of
most of my pieces. The emotional, physical, and social issues associated with mental health issues are often difficult to explain in plain language, which can be alienating to those who suffer and to the people
around them. I believe that art is one of the most effective methods of explaining this aspect of conditions such as these. I often make installations with projection mapped videos of performances. Aesthetically, I often use construction materials like wood and metal, painted found objects, and experimental video editing.
Tyrome Tripoli
Tyrome Salvatore Tripoli was born in Los Angeles, California in 1967. Growing up in a beach town outside of LA, he developed an early love for the power andmovement of the ocean; a driving force that fuels his art today. In 1990, Tripoli graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a BachelorDegree in Biochemistry and Visual Arts. In 1992 he found himself unfulfilled with a career in science and he moved to San Francisco to start a business making sculptural metal work.
Over the next ten years Tripoli worked full time designing and building one of a kind metal furniture and architectural metal work. In 1995, he co-founded Melting Point Art Studios and Gallery, a 7000 square foot art studio and exhibition space located in downtown San Francisco. In 1999 he began to experiment blowing glass into steel armatures, a series called Pods. In 2000 Tripoli was commissioned by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to create a blown glass and steel installation emerging from a pond. In 2001 Tripoli was selected to participate in the San Francisco Refuse and Recycle Artist in residency program. It was during this time that he discovered the potential of working with mixed media and creating conceptual sculpture. Focusing on assemblage sculpture and installation, Tripoli took his work on a world tour participating in an international art exhibition project called VERN.
Tripoli moved to Brooklyn, New York in 2003. At the present he is working on public and private commissions. Tripoli works and resides in Bushwick. He works full time creating mixed material sculpture, executing architectural metal work and furniture commissions and maintaining his art compound consisting of a sculpture studio on Troutman St and a contemporary art gallery he founded called Gallery Petite on Wilson Ave.
Mark Dixon
The isolation we often seek for solace, respite, creativity, or even reward has a very different feel when it is imposed. Partly from the inherent uncertainty and hardship, but also because it is our nature to chafe under compliance. We are all finding ways to become adaptive; some with remarkable altruism, others in self-indulgent “survival”.
I have been discovering and exploring many of the local land trust preserves and associated trails. Through a series of events, both geologic and personal, I live in an environment shaped by retreated glaciers. These glaciers found their terminus somewhere between my backyard and Long Island. Massive erratics, valleys strewn with boulders, exposed ledges, and cobbles dominate large parts of the landscape. Just try to dig a hole in your yard. These rocks were all placed or exposed by the whims of the glaciers, physics, and probability. But in some cases they have been altered by hands. Abandoned foundations, rudimentary fireplaces, and long linear stonewalls, of the sort that inspired Robert Frost, were all built by Colonial settlers. The clusters of cairns, serpents, and standing stones are of a more mysterious and debatable origin. I find these all very fascinating, hopefully not an obsession in germination. Moss and lichens covering the stones, ferns sprouting in shaded wet areas, and seasonal swelling streams add to the sense of a primal landscape. This all makes for beautiful hikes that lend to social distancing; hikes I would have otherwise passed by.
