This is a collective show of Ken Weir and three of his classmates from the New York Studio School, 1978 .

The exhibit is dedicated to the artists’ friend and classmate, David Saffer. It will be the first public display of David’s astonishing work. David died last year from an extremely rare prion disease called CJD. David was a brilliant and generous soul whose student paintings were mature works with beautiful and innovative colors and design. The exhibit will include still lifes, cityscapes and figure compositions. The colors are free yet based on close observation, similar to the works of Matisse and Bonnard.

Weir has included works from David’s friends and classmates–Robert Lobe, a photographer, and Morgan Taylor, a realist painter. Both reside in New York and have shown in numerous galleries—Lobe in the Queens Museum of Art and Taylor at the National Academy of Design and Blue Mountain Gallery. Lobe’s ‘found collages’ are discovered abstractions, one might call urban still lifes, such as layers of graffiti and posters attached to crumbling walls. The photographs are so precise that their complex surfaces are almost tactile. While Saffer was a precocious colorist, Taylor has an ability to draw without mistake, like a muscian’s perfect pitch. Yet his realist paintings are not overly precise, but are intimate and revealing character and light studies of ordinary folk.

Ken Weir is currently showing at the Nanticoke Valley Historical Society in the Town of Maine. One of the works prepared for that show will be on display, a triptych titled ‘The Settlement of Maine’. Weir says: “The Town of Maine was such fantastic wilderness with old growth forests, wolves, bears and panthers. The settlers exterminated the wolves and we’ve replaced the wilderness with parks and paved paths.” The panels in the allegory depicting these events are titled: “The Imagination of Man”, “The Extirpation” and “The Tamed Species”.

The four artists studied at the school with the renowned New York figurative painter, Paul Georges. The exhibit demonstrates the powerful influence a single teacher can have, and at the same time the different expressive path each personality takes.