Andes Academy of Art Exhibition Something Different

ANDES - Artist Coco Dalton with her film producer son Toby Dalton and stone sculptor Ken Hiratsuka at the Something Different opening reception 

Coco Dalton with her son Toby Dalton at the opening reception of Something Different at the Andes Academy of Art May 18th 

ANDES — The three artists at the Andes Academy of Art opening reception May 18th for ‘Something Different’ share one thing in common, as each have chosen to have the courage to step off the path of life and create a new world of art for themselves. 

Coco Dalton

Dalton spent many years touring the world with the composer, singer, entertainer Meredith Monk up until about twenty years ago. After this wild ride of dancing and singing with Monk as a performance artist, Dalton needed another outlet to express he need to create art. Over the past couple decades Dalton has been creating psychedelic abstract art.  The astonishing thing about Dalton is that she is a completely self-taught artist, known as an outsider artist. Dalton refers to a line that she says describes her personality in her book, ‘Everything I Know I Learned on Acid’ – ‘Digressions incontestably are the sunshine’ which a quote by the novelist Laurence Sterne. This tapping into the intuitive runs parallel to the local outsider artists Tony Margiotta and Christina Varga, each of them with different styles of creating art but seeming coming from the same mindset. Dalton’s colors are so well chosen. Coco’s paintings, which she calls “scribbled auras,” combine words and images to

create evocative portraits of her subjects, both human and animal, her pig Albert, her donkey Emma, and a neighbor's cow, Bertha, are among those who have sat for their portraits. In these images, Coco is as interested in the interior life of her subjects as in their physical appearance—hence the use of words, phrases, and stories in her paintings. Dalton explains her process, “I feel the personality of whoever you’re painting is the most important thing. When you see a portrait, you want it to tell you what that person was like. Were they talkative, outgoing, or did they lead an active inner life that you discern beneath the surface? Sometimes I draw on tales from Greek mythology and the Arabian Nights because these stories express our fantasy life in a way that is often truer than the facts of our lives. We live most of our lives inside our heads and that's the quality I wanted to express in

these paintings.” Her faux Warhol cows were featured in an Andy Warhol retrospective at the

Chelsea Hotel in New York City. She also had the great honor of being banned in Walton, New York, where her paintings, hung in a bank lobby, were deemed “wicked” and “pagan.”

Eric Roguski

The dedication to creating art by Roguski could reasonably be considered as rivaled by few. This incredible sketch artist who spent three days and two nights (sleeping on the floor of the Andes Academy of Art) to install hundreds of his postcard size sketches with simple messaging reflects the world as he witnesses things around him unfold. Roguski, as with the other two artists in this exhibition, had health issues that forced him to leave his elementary school teaching position. This departure from his journey as a teacher created the time and space for Roguski to document his frustrations with society and express it in the form of simple dialogue with characters that he intuitively feels fits the topic. 

During the opening reception this past Saturday, Roguski was sitting at a metal desk, head down focused on another one of his sketches, as he said, “I’m not feeling the mood of this event” Giving him space to be inspired to talk about his work. Once Roguski sold a piece, he lit up and was ready to put his pen down and chat, “I’m not an artist. I don’t claim to represent the art world. I’m an educator, I’m a schoolteacher. Art was not my initial calling, it was not taught to me, but a lot of these creations come from the un-repressing of memories of stuff from the past, things that happened to me.” 

The messaging is vague, but powerful and relatable to most anyone. This reporter has never argued the perspective of someone that creates work for an exhibition, but Roguski is a marvelous artist. 

John Sanders

Anyone involved in the art community knows Sanders for his stunning abstract work with all forms of metal sculptures. Through many years of dealing with torches and chemicals as an iron worker in NYC and decades of creating metal sculptures, Sanders health has prevented him from continuing to build on his monumental achievements as a sculptor. Sanders has taken up abstract painting over the past year with results that reflect the creative designs of his days as a sculptor. Sanders is tenacious with decades of experience and knowledge in the realm of abstraction. He expressed great confidence in this new direction of his career, “I’ve been missing the creative process of making art. This feels right. I feel like I’m on the right path.” 

For more information, see @andesacademyofart on Instagram 

Andes Academy of Art is located at 506 Main Street in Andes