This past week Suzanne Ouellette’s new exhibit went up in our Hammertown Rhinebeck Gallery. The official opening and artist’s reception will be July 2nd but we thought it would be fun to let you in on what exactly goes into the exhibits you see in our Gallery. I asked our exhibit coordinator, Virginia Strull, if she’d give us some background on how “Impressions and Reflections” came to be. — Joan
“IMPRESSIONS AND REFLECTIONS”
Paintings by Suzanne C. Ouellette
Getting Ready for the Show
The exhibition began in November of last year in the Mountain Cow Café in Pine Plains. An engaging, spirited, and warm conversation between Joan, Suzanne, and myself set the deal: There would be a show of primarily still life paintings that would hang in The Gallery at Hammertown Rhinebeck from mid-June through Labor Day weekend.
For Suzanne, making paintings for the Hammertown exhibition was an opportunity to continue working on a set of painting challenges that intrigued her. She described three goals: Painting light as it moved through glass (and through water in a glass), painting silver and other reflecting surfaces, painting still lifes so that they communicated a palpable human presence even though there were no people in the scene.
About midway through the work, Suzanne noticed that the best paintings were falling into two categories (she attributed this to having worked all those years as a psychologist and social scientist: she simply couldn’t keep herself from looking for categories and themes). The identification of the categories gave her a title for the exhibition: “Impressions and Reflections,” and a direction in which to continue pushing the work.
As Suzanne describes them, each of those words– impressions and reflections — is chock-full of meaning for the artist and people looking at the art. All paintings are an artist’s impression of and reflection upon some part of the world (be it a person, object, or place). Paintings are also an invitation to viewers to create their own impressions of and reflections upon not only the painting, but also the world (person, object, place) that inspired the painting. 
Several paintings represent impressions and reflections in very specific ways, too. For example, with regard to impressions, Suzanne explained that she was drawn to paint things that reveal the impressions that people have left on objects in the world. A pair of boots are in a painting without their owner, but all of the boots’ folds, creases, and bends — the impressions – show that a person has been in them, has walked and worked a lot in them. The person has made a difference for those boots.
Once the paintings in New York City were done, the challenge was to get them to Pine Plains. In a process that Suzanne compares to the landing at Normandy, all arrived here safely in time for Pine Plains studio visits by myself, Joan and Jeffrey Daly, of Jeff Daly Design, (www.jeffdalydesign.com). Jeff had graciously agreed to oversee the hanging of the show in Rhinebeck.
For the visit by Jeff, Suzanne put up and along her studio walls, all of the paintings that might be considered for the Hammertown show.
As Jeff walked through the studio, he shared much of what is important to him as he thinks about pulling together an exhibition. Jeff was, for 30 years, the Chief of Design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
He is the design person responsible for creation, expansion, and renovation of those marvelous Met spaces like the galleries of Greek and Roman art and the Costume Institute. This is a man who knows a lot about presenting art. He explains how the interest and beauty of a painting seen on its own is not all that matters. In an exhibition, several paintings need to work well with each other. No single painting, no matter how wonderful, should be allowed to dominate the show. All the paintings selected share something in common, and they need to be arranged to enhance each other.
The artist beamed when Jeff put two particular paintings together (that boot painting and the chair painting on the card for the exhibition). Jeff launched a conversation between the paintings. Each painting taught something about the other.
On June 10th, Jeff, Suzanne and I hung the show in The Gallery at Hammertown Rhinebeck. We began the work by putting all the paintings out and around the wonderful large room in which they would be hung; a room filled with beautiful furniture.
The job was then to make decisions about how to group the paintings and where exactly to place them.
Suzanne said that she could not stop thinking about the frequently quoted (and much misunderstood) statement by Matisse:
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter … a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
In this exhibit, you get both art and armchairs. The challenge is to hang the art in a way that doesn’t force the visitor to Hammertown to choose between looking at the art and looking at the furniture. The furniture should help someone view the art (try sitting on the couch and looking at those paintings inspired by Lippi and Frans Hals). And the art may help one experience the furniture as it encourages people really to look at something and pay attention to how objects make them think and feel.
Jeff was the person most responsible for this process, and Suzanne and I made contributions to help insure paintings were level and to check that paintings were indeed making impressions and inspiring reflections. But it was Jeff who went up and down the ladder countless times and around and over the furniture gracefully and tirelessly.
It was a long day of hanging, eight hours in all, with only a quick break for lunch taken on site. It was great fun, but one should not minimize how hard and even risky the work was. Check out this last photo. The painter appears to be fretting about something they have finished.
Meanwhile, as he starts to hang the last and hardest grouping, the designer struggles to keep his balance on the soft couch and not lose hold of those two canvases in his hands.
