SHFAP presents two exhibitions concurrently. In the front gallery, we are showing Signal, recent paintings by Stephanie Pierce and in the rear space, Paintings, by Ruth Miller.

Both artists work from life and each have each found ways to enrich the process through the intensity of their engagement.

Stephanie Pierce’s work is intrinsically related to place and light. Previously she has made paintings of windows, the transitional frame in between inside and out. This exhibition includes recent paintings of views from Staten Island overlooking New York Harbor. Her long-term observation, sometimes over months, brings an implied element of time into her painting. Slight adjustments of perspective lend them a subtle perceptual flicker.

Pierce was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. She obtained her MFA at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2007 she began teaching at the University of Arkansas. While she was there she created a DIY space for art and music, called Lalaland. Two years ago she took a position teaching painting in New York City at FIT.

Brett Baker wrote about her last show at SHFAP in 2014, “… she approaches the ‘impossible’ task of capturing nature with lucid patience – a consistent, unhurried focus…. In her paintings, thousands of highly varied marks rise into place, each notation of light rustling gently against the next.”

In 2014 she received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors’ Grant. Her work is currently included in Disrupted Realism at Stanek Gallery in Philadelphia.

In her still-life paintings, Ruth Miller takes simple objects of the world and turns them into something gleaming and complex. Also painting trees around her studio in Connecticut, critic Nancy Grimes observes that Miller’s, “meditative engagement with nature is revealed in her quiet and subtle works. It is not uncommon for Miller to return again and again to the same motif or source…and search for its significant form. Miller’s sense of touch; of brush to canvas or pencil to paper, is shaped by the feeling she has for the space that is sensed moving out and around her…”

Ruth Miller was long associated with the New York Studio School as a teacher and critic. She has been a visiting artist at numerous schools across the country. Her paintings will be included in the upcoming 2018 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts from March 8th- April 8th at The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work will also be included in Cultivate Your Own Garden at The Painting Center from February 27- March 24. Last summer her work was shown along with that of her husband, Andrew Forge (1923-2002), longtime Yale teacher, painter and scholar at The Washington Art Association in Washington, CT. Miller’s work appeared in SHFAP’s 2nd Brick Walk & Harvey catalog in 2009 and in Painting in the Garden an exhibition organized by SHFAP at The Judy Black Memorial Park & Gardens in Washington, CT in 2016.