CAROL HEFT
carolheft@mindspring.com

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Spiral, crayon, charcoal, collage on canvas, 60" x 18", 2008
 

Angels, gouache, watercolor, and crayon on paper 10" x 12", 2008

Out of Line  ink and chalk on paper,12" x 18", 2008
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Seated figure study  1, 2006, charcoal, 18 x 24
 

Seated figure study  2, 2006, charcoal, 18 x 24
 
 

seated female, charcoal, 2007
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

9th Avenue, 2007charcoal and chalk on grey paper, 18"x24"
 
 

43rd Street, 2007, pencil on paper 20" x 24"
 
 
 

9th Avenue2007, pencil on paper 20" x 24"

 
 

43rd Street, 2007, pencil on paper 20" x 24"

 
 
 
 
 
 

Landscape Study Backyard #1, 2006 pencil on paper
 
 

Landscape Study #2, 2006, pencil on paper
 
 

Landscape Study #3, 2006, pencil on paper
 
 
 
 
 

Figure studies, 18"x 24", 2006, chalk and charcoal
 
 

Figure studies 18" x 24" charcoal 2006
 
 

Figure studies, 36" x  80" (detail 32" x 38") charcoal on brown paper 2005
 

Figure studies, 36" x  60"  charcoal on brown paper 2005
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Unicycle, Exuberance, Tenderness, (gallery view) 2005, courtesy of Blue Mountain Gallery
 
 

Windy, transfer drawing, crayon on tagboard, 2005, 9" x 14"
 
 
 

"About Time", 21" x 28", ink, gouache, paper mounted on board, 2005
 
 
 

"Waves", 18"x 22",  paper, crayon, charcoal on board, 2005,
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Untitled, 24"x18", papermache, string, ink, paint mounted on board, 2005
 
 
 
 

"Dolphin Dance", 36" x 16", crayon, oil on foam core board, 2001
 
 
 

Concrete Thinking, 10" x 7", oil, crayon, wax and watercolor on paper, 2003
 
 
 

"Yellow Solo" Crayon, oil, paper, 14"x 18", 2001
courtesy of Cynthia Keyworth
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"Escape" Crayon, oil, on foam core board,18" x 46"  2002
 
 
 
 

"At the Edge", 36"x48" oil on canvas, 2002
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"Figure", charcoal and graphite on paper, 10" x 14", 2002
 
 
 

Paleolithic Forms, charcoal, pencil, paper, 12"x14", 2002
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Table of Contents

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 New Work
 Solo Exhibitions
 Group Exhibitions
 Reviews/Publications
 Collections
 Teaching
 Figurative Drawings
 Studies after Pieter Breughel the Elder
 Interview with ArtDeal
 Arts Magazine Review
 Self Portrait
 

Solo Exhibitions

2005 "A Faceless Place"  Blue Mountain Gallery, Carol Heft, New York, NY
2004 Fairleigh Dickinson University, Carol Heft, Drawings, Teaneck, NJ
2003 Blue Mountain Gallery, Carol Heft, Drawings and Paintings, New York, NY
2002 Washington Art Association, Drawings and Paintings, Washington Depot, CT
2000 Dubois Gallery, “Pushing the Line” Lehigh University, Bethelehm, PA
         Blue Mountain Gallery, “Over The Line,” New York, NY
1998 Blue Mountain Gallery, Recent Work, New York, NY
1989 Ten Worlds Gallery, Drawings and Paintings, New York, NY
1982 Gallery 120, “The Painted Moon,” New York, NY

Selected Group Exhibitions

2008   Moravian College Payne Gallery, Faculty Exhibition, Bethlehem, PA
2007   Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College, "Heft, Fletcher, Haas:Recent Work", Bethlehem, PA
2006   Cedar Crest College Faculty Exhibition, Allentown PA,
2005   Blue Mountain Gallery, Word and Image, New York, NY
2004   Moravian College Payne Gallery, "The Faculty Creates, The Faculty Collects", Bethlehem, PA
2003   Northampton Community College Gallery, Faculty Exhibition, Bethlehem, PA
           Blue Mountain Gallery, Works on Paper, New York, NY
           New York University Galleries, Small Works Exhibition, New York, NY
           Martin Art Gallery, The Women Artists: Past & Present. Allentown, PA
2002   Banana Factory, Friends: Near and Far, Bethlehem, PA
           Perkins Center for the Arts, A Tribute to New York, Moorestown, NJ
           Walter Wickiser Gallery, Small Works Room, New York, NY
           Bryant Street Gallery, Works on Paper, Palo Alto, CA
           Elsa Mott Ives Gallery, “Rhythmic Renderings”, New York, NY
           2001 Elsa Mott Ives Gallery, “Dreams,”, New York, NY
           Blue Mountain Gallery, “Vertical,” New York, NY
           Martin Art Gallery, “Local Color II”, Allentown, PA
2000   Wayne Art Center, 2000 National Spring Open Juried Exhibition, Wayne, PA
           Blue Mountain Gallery, “New Work” group exhibition of gallery artists, New York, NY
1999   Northampton Community College, Group Exhibition of Teaching Artists, Bethlehem, PA
           Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, NY Memory
           Creiger-Dane Gallery, Boston, MA, Severed Ear, The Poetry of Abstraction
           Kirkland Art Center, Clinton, NY, Aspects of Abstraction
1998   Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, Ithaca, NY, “Made in New York”
           Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, NY, Windows
1997   Mallette Art Gallery, Artists of the Blue Mountain Gallery
           Eastern Washington University Gallery “10th National Computer Art Invitational
1996   Amador County Arts Council (ACAC), Sutter Creek, CA, A Celebration of Art III
           St. John’s University Gallery First Annual Digital Elements National Exhibition
1995   Blue Mountain Gallery, Small Works Invitational
1994   PSA Art Showcase III, New York, NY Subjective Projections
1992   Columbia College and Missouri Arts Council, Paper in Particular
1991   Compagnie Moderne et Comtemporaine, Paris, Recent Trends in painting
1989   Artists Space New York, NY Artists from the Studio in a School Association
1988   Ten Worlds Gallery, Skywheel II, New York, NY
           Chappelle St. Jean, L’Art L.E.S., Versailles, France
1986   Pene Dubois Gallery, Configurists, New York, NY
1985   Gallery 120, The Painted Head, New York, NY
1984   BACA Gallery, Women in the Arts, Brooklyn, NY
1983   New York Studio School Gallery, Artists of the Figurative Alliance, New York
1976   Woods-Gerry Gallery, Senior Group Exhibition, Rhode Island School of Design

Selected Reviews/Publications

Manhattan Plaza News, Maria Ciaccia, Feature Article, January 2004
Exhibition Catalogue, "Women Artists Past and Present," Muhlenberg College, 2003
Exhibition Catalogue, "Friends: Near and Far," Binney and Smith Gallery, 2003
Magazine.Art, Tina Seligman, review of “Rhythmic Renderings, March, 2000
Exhibition Catalogue, "Pushing the Line," DuBois Gallery, Lehigh University, 2000
The Morning Call, review of “Pushing the Line” by Tony Seinzant, October 29, 2000
Exhibition Catalogue, “Over the Line,” Blue Mountain Gallery, 1997 and 2000
ARDEAL magazine , Online Interview with Addison Parks, , 1999 http://www.artdealmagazine.com/heft.html
The World's Who’s Who of Women, 1997
RISD Views, page 38, fall 1996, and spring, 1997
Artspeak, February 16, page 6, 1989
New York Art Review, Third Edition, 1989
Arts Magazine, October, page 17, 1982
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Awards/Affiliations

Honorable Mention, 2000 National Spring Open Juried Exhibition, Wayne Art Center
Member, College Art Association
Member, American Association of Museums
Honors, Rhode Island School of Design, 1975-76
Florence Leif Award, Rhode Island School of Design, 1976

Selected Corporate and Public Collections

The Bond Market Association, New York, NY
The Carpenter Group, New York, NY
Integrated Research Services, New York, NY
Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, PA
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY
Muhlenberg College, Martin Art Gallery, Allentown, PA
Torch Energy Advisors Incorporated, Houston, TX
Warfield Music, New York, NY

Selected Private Collections

Don and Kathy Bartholomay, Albany, NY
Christina Bellinghauson, Los Angeles, CA
Ken and Mori Binko, Central Valley, NY
Bruce David Cohen, Esq., New York, NY
Vivian DeGeorges, Hempstead, NY
Chris and Laura Fagin, Seattle, WA
Jane Culp and Louis Finkelstein, New York, NY
Elmera Goldberg, NYC
Cynthia Keyworth and Jim Weston, Tuscon, AZ and New York, NY
Rafael Laporte and Dr. Heidi Laporte, Brooklyn,NY
Howard Leshaw
Rachel and Dave McCracken, Columbia, MD
Charles and Helga Melmed, FL
Lewis and Sali Neff, Philadelphia, PA
Joshua Schwarzman, Baltimore, MD
Erica and Peter Silver, NYC
Damien and Janet Sokol, New York, NY
Gary and Donna Stanton, Buffalo, NY
Robert Martin and Younghee Choi Martin, NYC
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Education

Madison Art School, Robert Brackman, N.A.
Hunter College, M.Ed.
Rhode Island School of Design, B.F.A
 

Teaching/Lectures

Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA, Part-Time Lecturer, 1998-present
Design curriculum and teach drawing and painting to undergraduates
Drawing, Painting, and Drawing with Color, Drawing from Nature. Integrate relevant aspects of art history into studio courses.  Color theory, chiaroscuro and underpainting techniques, construction, composition and design.

Monroe College, Bronx, New York, Adjunct Professor, 2005-present
Black and Hispanic Artists in the 19th and 20th Century,  Art History I and II, Prehistoric to Modern.  Lecture, slide and video presentations, and museum visits.  Student presentations and discussion to facilitate awareness of art and art history as it relates to contemporary life.

Cedar Crest College, Allentown, PA, Adjunct Professor, 2000-present
Drawing.  Emphasis on experience of plastic elements of drawing and two dimensional art including wet and dry medium, chiaroscuro, perspective, and scale.  Students work from model and still life.  Critiques, slide presentations.
Painting.  Introduction to portrait, still life, and figure painting, color theory, composition.
Art Hisory:  Women Artists and Introduction to Art History.  Prehistoric to Romanesque.

Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA, Adjunct Professor, 2003
Modern and Post Modern Art. Provide aesthetic, cultural and historical information to enhance art appreciation and understanding of art history and contemporary art theory and criticism.

Northampton Community College ,Adjunct Professor,  Bethlehem, PA, 2002-2004
Introduction to Art History Provide students with an introduction to the nature, vocabulary, media and history of art from a cross cultural perspective.

ArtsConnection, Teaching Artist, New York, NY 2001-present
Design and present in-school visual arts residency programs which connect to a range of curricular, thematic, or cultural areas for public school children in New York City.  Provide professional development workshops for teachers. Portfolio class at Peter Stuyvesant High School.Mural and Art History program at Fashion Industries High School, New York City.

Studio in a School Association, New York, NY Teaching Artist/Mentor1987-89,1999-present
Design and implement art curriculum for New York City public school teachers, develop lesson plans that integrate math, reading, social studies and science with art. Conduct training for after school programs. Teach and co-teach grades K-6 in New York City public schools in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx.  Conduct workshops for Project Read that incorporate arts and literacy standards for public school teachers.

Craft Students League, YWCA, New York, NY  Teaching Artist, 2002-2003
Maskmaking, drawing, printmaking. Develop and present age and ability appropriate creative activities for children and adolescents with developmental disabilities in inclusive summer art program.
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1999 Interview with Addison Parks, publisher of Artdeal online art magazine.
Mr. Parks is a painter, writer, and art critic

Addison:   How did you get going as an artist?

Carol:  When I was 5 or 6, my grandmother used to take me with her when she delivered groceries. We used to pass a churchyard with a statue of the Virgin Mary.  I was mesmerized.  I thought it was magic. She’d have to pry me away.  Then when I was about 8 my father bought himself some oil paints and set up a still life.  He let me paint along with him and I loved it. My parents let me take “art lessons” at a local frame shop in Stony Brook, New York where we lived.  The teacher was a painter named Anne Tuttle.  Anne used to go to an art school in Madison Connecticut every summer and took me with her there to study with Robert Brackman.  Brackman was a masterful American figurative artist who taught at the Art Student’s League at the time.  I got a great foundation in composition; color, portrait and landscape painting; talking to grownups, and my first look at a nude model at the Madison Art School.

Addison:   What do you credit for your love of art, and what lead you to dedicate your life to it?

Carol:  My love of art is something I discovered in myself at an early age.  I think it started with that feeling I had as a child in front of the statues in the churchyard.  I found I had an ability to draw and that delighted me.  It was really a thrill.  I think my art provided me with a way to transcend certain aspects of my reality – it was a spiritual experience, though I didn’t always call it that.  That’s what hooked me.  I had a lot of encouragement from teachers too.  One time I asked Gary Stanton, my high school art teacher if he thought I was dedicated enough to be an artist.  He was very supportive.  I knew from the beginning that it was going to be a lifetime commitment.

Addison:  What do you think the kind of work you do has to offer the art community at large?

Carol: What my work offers is a kind of energy and freedom.  There are unlimited ways to explore 3 dimensional space in a 2 dimensional format.  I think my strengths are imagination, ability to integrate plastic elements such as line, form, and color to create and describe space in a somewhat (not entirely) abstract way, and the playful quality I sometimes see in my work.

Addison: A lot of people think that twentieth century art will end up on thetrash heap, if it hasn't already. What contributions do you think willlast and why?

Carol:  Actually, I have nothing against the trash heap.  I’m one of those people who thinks that what you see on the way to the museum is just as beautiful and valuable as what you see in the museum, and that stuff on the walls is only there to inspire you to look around on the way home.  20th Century art is a big topic.  Futurism and the industrial revolution, cubism, fauvism, expressionism, abstract expressionism, constructivism… it’s so inclusive.  As for what will last, who knows? I’ll leave that to the art historians!

Addison:  How did your art education affect you as an artist? What about your recent experiences?

Carol:  My teachers were all very influential, as were many of my classmates.  First there was Brackman.  I was only 12 or 13 and painting alongside grownups and getting a lot of attention because I could draw and had a good sense of design and color.  I started getting a big head about it.  One time when I was studying with Brackman I was working on a still life.  I had laid out the composition and placed the objects.  I started painting, and decided to work on an apple.  I painted the apple beautifully, but pretty much left the rest of the canvas bare, except for the drawing.  I was really proud.  Brackman used to come around and critique our work, with an entourage of students following him and hanging on his every word.  He came over to my painting and poked his finger at the canvas apple and said, “Never do a thing like that!”  I was devastated.  He was telling me the painting needed to be worked on all at once, the colors orchestrated together (you can have solos, but they have to be in the context of the whole composition).  I went outside and cried and cried. It was a painful but important lesson in humility.  I wanted him to tell me how great I was.  My self esteem was attached to getting praised for my artwork.  Later, at RISD I was with a number of talented and exciting students with diverse stylistic and artistic backgrounds.  It was a hard time for me.  I was torn between the traditional training I had and the desire to understand newer more contemporary ideas.  I also struggled with the need to prove myself.   I still feel good when I get compliments on my work, especially from my colleagues, but I’m less dependent on it as I get older.  Nowadays, I try to keep in contact with people whose work I admire.  Sometimes I contact an artist I don’t know but want to meet by email or regular mail and have developed a few relationships that way.  Supportive alliances with colleagues are very important to me.

Addison:  What do you think makes contemporary art attractive to some and not to others--what accounts for the love-hate relationship it has generatedfor the past hundred years?

Carol:  First of all, I think that people like to feel safe, and some people feel foolish if they don’t understand something.  Feeling foolish can lead to contempt for that which is not understood and a lot of “contemporary” art raises more questions than it answers.  I love Judy Pfaff’s work.  It’s so dynamic and energized, and its always faithful to it’s inspiration.  There will always be a reason to paint portraits and landscapes, if you so desire.  That doesn’t mean John Cage isn’t doing something fascinating too.  There’s room for everything. The thing is the energy and the desire, not the materials or the size or the fact that it’s popular or permanent or not.

Addison:  If there was a fire, accepting that you value all the work but could only save one piece by one artist, and knowing that it might have to represent what was great and good about our time, who and what would it be, and why?

Carol:  Guernica.  It’s an amazing painting both formally and for it’s profound social comment.   But it would kill me to leave behind works by Dubuffet, Tapies, DeKooning, Cy Twombly, Leger, and so many others.

Addison:  What is it about the inherent rivalry among individual artists and the private nature of the work that makes the art community so weak and divided?

Carol:  What an interesting question!  My husband (Bill Warfield) is a musician.  Sometimes I’m struck by the contrast between the collaborative nature of performing music and the isolation of painting.  Not that musicians aren’t competitive!  But composers need musicians, arrangers need composers, and musicians need each other to make the music come alive. They love each other while they’re playing.  You can tell.  The music washes away all the pettiness; at least for the moment it is being performed.  It’s what makes their hearts beat, if it’s real.  I can only speak for myself.  I know I’m very ambivalent about the “art community”.  I need other artists and want them to flourish just as I want that for myself, but sometimes I get jealous.  I start to think there’s not enough to go around.  Not enough money, approval, gallery space, attention.  That happens when I’m not focused on my own work.  I guess that’s human nature.  I joined a co-op gallery in New York so I could be part of a community and not have to deal with the constraints of commercialism.  It makes me feel good to do service that way, and I get to interact with artist I probably wouldn’t get to know if I was out there on my own.

Addison: What keeps you going?

Carol: The work itself.  Nothing can compare with the sense of discovery when a painting starts to come together, when you do something and don’t exactly understand it but it’s clearly a breakthrough and you’ve reached another level.  Sometimes I see it in a colleague’s work, and I love that too.  Almost everything I do is so I can have a few of those moments in my life.  The promise of those moments keeps me going.  Painting is it’s own reward.

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Article from Arts Magazine, November, 1982, p.17 (Christa Lanchaster)

There is something sleepy about Carol Heft’s paintings.  She paints moody, languid landscapes that transmit through color and surface the signs of air, earth, and water.  They are full of light and breath and fun.  They display a joyful sense of what mark and shape can do and a fascination for the unlimited possibilities of color association.   Her subject swims in the Chaucerian stream of reverie and revelry.  Each painting tells its own tale in terms, which are playful and lulling at the same time.  Child-like animal forma graze in fields of pink, green, and blue; recumbent figures sleep on beaches and lovers float overhead.

These are landscapes of illusion and of contraction.  Their space is conceptual yet their literal references are from the natural world: one lone bison, cow/cats by a pond, a lazy beach scene, half moons in the sky.  In each landscape there is foreground, horizon, and sky but no attempt to create a three-dimensional perspectiveal space.  This is in keeping with heft’s technique of primitive Twomblyish drawing.  She divides the canvas intuitively much the way a child might with the three basic zones.  This is just one example of her additive process.  Her landscapes acquire depth through the slow working of the surface rather than through the plotting of lines in space.

Naïve and awkward creatures, both human and animal, are the focus of Heft’s compositions.  Their primal character links them up with cave-painting;  their presence in a radiant world of modernist proportions makes them somewhat comical.  In one small painting the beast is long snouted and stump legged.  Another long work has two or three creatures that combine sinuous feline curves with a bovine personality.  Their arched backs create a strong formal motif; the arcs unite separate sections and establish and undulating rhythm which helps bind this long, rambling canvas together.  The creatures have a formal as well as narrative value.

The surface of the canvas tells another story about form and its treatment.  Heft’s scrawled drawing touch, collaged shapes, and scrubbed-worn patina is common to all her latest paintings.  The way she works is left for us to see and feel.  She does nothing to disguise the history of a painting – its peaks and troughs, its dull and its glowing moments.  It is all there to read slowly and digest.  Heft has a system of feeling out shapes through tracing chalk or crayon round and round.  The resulting image is linear and rough like a child'’ scribble.  With brush and pint she can register all the changes from chalky opacity through watery translucence.  Where washes allow canvas to shine through, paint and canvas seem almost immaterial.  She can also lay down thick pigment or scrape canvas. It feels as aged and work as an Indian hide.

While Heft’s paintings contain narrative and figuration, they are also formally abstract.   In her Beach painting, a large, flat turquoise triangle points toward a complex, tightly packed assemblage of abstract shapes.  These small shapes (pyramids, lunettes, triangles, scrap-ends of color) signal flags or beacons or satellites, floating in their own space.  They can wake up a potentially dead area or balance the whole.  They may be unrelated to the story, but may also represent a kind of debris in our unconscious.

These paintings work themselves out slowly.  They grow and grow through the process of addition and subtraction.  The result is a fractured underpinning.  They are held together by threads.  Each little mark is a weight to balance the structure.  Each painting is full of hundreds of subtle adjustments.  As a whole it is color and shape rather than content which keeps them from falling apart.  Heft’s palette is milky, smooth, and soft; red, blue, and green are the predominate colors.  Flickers of bright chroma (yellows, fuchsia, and orange) and areas of white light keep the intensity high.  There is a captivating quality about these color relationships which invites participation.  While the lyrical blues and reds soothe, the tangy brights beam out and bring us in.

There are three large (5’ x 6’, 10’ x 11’, and 16’ x 4’) works in this show, and several smaller ones.  It was worth comparing the long bison painting with the smaller (38”x42”) image of the single animal.  Both are horizontal and use an animal form as subject, and both are cumulative works. But where the elongated painting sublimates energy through the lengthy, additive process, the small format retains the freshness of quicker color and pint.  Conventional composition runs second to intuitive color in the imaginative, romantic process.  In the small space there is less room for the diffusion of strengths.  It is in Carol Heft’s smaller work that her strengths are most highly concentrated: those of color, shape, and feeling.  (Gallery 120, May 1-23, 1982)
 

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