Drawing, Eyes Closed Art: The Vault: Judith Linscott

As I walk into the Vault Gallery in Great Barrington, housed in the former Mahaiwe Bank building, there’s a photo shoot going on, some French jazz, various people milling about, directions being given and flashbulbs going off.

This is a welcoming place. For, despite the busyness, I’m asked several times if I would like help or information.

The gallery is small and a bit quirky; quotes are painted on the walls, chairs are arranged for tete-a-tetes and potted orchids lend both beauty and color. Then there’s that vault — yes, there is a vault, in all its vault glory, serving as the smaller room of this two-room gallery.

And soon enough I am in conversation with Marilyn Kalish, the gallery’s proprieter, whose "Sensuality of Dance" series is currently on display.

Kalish’s work is all about energy, and movement. A year or so ago she was drawing birds; now she’s drawing and painting dancers — dancers in the process of leaping, twirling, swooping. Not, she is quick to point out, Degas-like dancers, posing.

While Kalish’s current obsession is dancers, which she starts by viewing at nearby Jacob’s Pillow, it’s not dance itself that draws her. It’s the physics of energy and movement...

The Artful Mind

Marilyn Kalish "Making Bold Moves"

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Drawing is mark making to be sure, but it's also “another kind of language.” No matter their scale, their medium, or their function—preparatory or a final expression of a creative idea—drawings speak of intimacy and immediacy. Marilyn Kalish adds physicality, with un-choreographed dancers’ movements, to the language of drawing. The force of her work explodes, the edges of the paper barely containing forms, lines, colors and marks. You cannot look passively at her paintings and drawings, but, swept up by their movement, you enter them.

I spoke with Marilyn Kalish in her new undertaking, the Vault Gallery. She is exhibiting her sketches and paintings in a group show called, Sanctuary: The Power of Images.

The process of making art continually fascinates Kalish and informs all of her work. On her web site, www.marilynkalish.com, viewers can see the process unfold. I asked her to talk about her process...

The Berkshire Eagle

What could be simpler than 'Black/White'?

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Art Review Berkshire Eagle Staff STOCKBRIDGE—What could be simpler? Put four artists in a gallery and call what they do "Black/White" Yet when one is a sculptor, another a painter, the third a photographer and the fourth a printmaker well, you start to see the complications. Still, the exhibition of recent work by Denny Alsop, Marilyn Kalish, Clemens Kalischer and Joe Wheaton at Kalischer's Image Gallery through Feb. 28, comes off—in an improbable, quirky sort of way. That's because each of the above—beyond working in black and white—also builds his or her compositions mostly through lines and patterns. So Wheaton's metal sculptures—geometric arrays of spears, disks and quadrangles—comfortably inhabit the gallery with Kalischer's pictures of fallen leaves, bare tree branches and rusticating bricks; Alsop's lithographs of grids, loops and beaded lines; and Kalish's charcoal and ink portrait and figure drawings...

The Worcester Phoenix

Wax works - Living, breathing images in charcoal and wax

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Some readers may remember that it was a little less than a year ago that art works by Marilyn Solomon Kalish were favorably reviewed in the pages of this paper. At that time, she was heavily involved with three-dimensional bas-reliefs and sculptural wall pieces. However, she also showed, somewhat reluctantly, three new charcoal and wax "drawings" which turned out to be portents of a fundamental change in direction for her artistic endeavors.

Now, eight months later we can see her very latest works in the Gordon Library gallery at WPI. The current images are the complete antithesis of her previous works, objects that were very time consuming to gather and arrange and then construct to exacting specifications. These new pieces consist of a complex array of fleeting gestural marks seemingly made in a race to capture the feeling and the instant, to freeze them in the wax before they escape. The very large scale of each drawing at first commands our attention, and then beckons us in for a closer look. And on close examination we begin to see just how facile Kalish is with her drawing implements...

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette

Kalish's Drawing Now It's Own Reward

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It is probably fair to say that Marilyn Solomon Kalish's favorite drawing at the moment is “Breathe,” the huge, majestic, invigorating smudge of charcoal that is the centerpiece of her latest exhibition at WPI's George C. Gordon Library. The image is just the suggestion of a figure; arms outstretched; head thrown back; one leg about to take a giant step forward, perhaps, as the torso inhales expansively.

For Ms. Kalish the piece is not just defining but transforming. She views it as something of an artistic gateway through which she has finally passed after a lifetime of treating drawings as preliminary exercises in preparation for more substantial works of art.

“I've always sketched. I've always drawn since I was young," Ms. Kalish said. "I didn't place a lot of value on my drawings because, historically, they were the prelude to a more important piece.” Her outlook changed when she discovered wax and figured out how to use it in her drawings...

The Worcester Phoenix

Junkyard god: Cast-off angels and toys become Kalish's treasures

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The notion of time looms large in Marilyn Solomon Kalish's work—in the conception and in the execution. Each of the nine wall-mounted assemblages, which are currently on display in the ARTSWorcester Gallery at Quinsigamond Community College, appears to have slowly grown from the pages of history almost by themselves.

These works, which look so deceptively simple, were, in fact, quite time-consuming to construct. Kalish spent hours wandering through two "secret" junkyards looking for things, anything that caught her eye. She would often find beauty and significance in cast-off items; and once back in her studio, she began to restore, arrange, and to rearrange her treasures until they came together. The frameworks were built to exacting specifications, finished appropriately, and then all the disparate parts assembled.

The large centerpiece of the QCC show, Liaison, is so powerful for its combination of textures of soft fabric, smooth slate, and of coarse stone dust. It produces an intimate tête-à-tête between encrusted shards from two ancient chalices (which are actually bits of broken PVC pipe). For Clandestine, Kalish juxtaposed a smooth, slate surface on a plane of roughly scored and tinted-marble dust. On top of this, she has affixed a timeworn, brass effigy of two tiny cherubs posed in a secretive manner...