INTERVIEW: Artist Marsha Heller looks to the sky
Above Photo: Marsha Heller’s new exhibition is called The Sky’s the Limit: The Paintings by Marsha Heller. Photo courtesy of Marsha Heller / Provided by Luhrs & Associates with permission of artist.
New York City’s Ceres Gallery will play host to a new solo exhibition by renowned artist Marsha Heller. The Sky’s the Limit: Paintings by Marsha Heller will be featured from today, Feb. 27 through March 24. The public is invited to a special reception to honor Heller’s work, March 8 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Heller is both a painter and musician, and brings both of her passions together for the new exhibition. In the pieces, she explores themes of resonance and dissonance in her landscapes, skyscapes and natural scenes.
The New Jersey resident has had her work featured at the Cork Gallery at Lincoln Center, Phoenix Gallery and St. Peter’s Church in the Citicorp Building. Montclair State University’s Gallery One also hosted a Heller exhibition.
Recently, Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Heller. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
When did you first start painting landscapes and skyscapes? Does it go back to your early days as an artist?
I’ve been painting landscapes forever. I look out my studio window, and there it is. Gardens and fields and woods and ponds, and, of course, the sky coming through the trees.
I started to focus on the sky from seeing it in the rearview mirror, as I drive home from teaching people to play the oboe at Montclair State University, up the Garden State Parkway. The colors that day were magnificent blues and oranges; it reminded me of what [Vincent] Van Gogh said: ‘Where there is blue, there must be orange.’
How do you see the connection between art and music in your work?
Music and art are two forms of expressing your innermost feelings without words — the discipline required to learn to play the oboe and the freedom of painting with or without a subject in front of me have enhanced each other.
When did you realize you wanted to be a professional artist?
I don’t know that I ever actually decided to become a professional artist. When you start selling your work, which I did in 1986, then you are a professional.
How did The Sky’s the Limit start to take shape as an exhibition? When did you realize you had enough work for an entire show?
In 2012, I published The Book of Skies, a series of 12 paintings of the sky in different seasons and times of the day. You can’t paint a sky that nature hasn’t already done, but it is challenging to try. The little book became the impetus for my first show featuring skies at The Riverside Gallery in Hackensack, New Jersey.
What’s on the horizon for you after the exhibition?
As for the future, my work is becoming more and more abstract, and abstraction will be the focus of my next show at Ceres Gallery in New York City in 2020.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Sky’s the Limit: Paintings by Marsha Heller is currently on view through March 24 at Ceres Gallery, 547 W. 27th St. in New York City. Click here for more information.
