A Change of Scenery

Saturday Part 2:
My husband and I also took the train to Maplewood, N.J., yesterday, where my stepbrother, Jay, lives. It's the first time I'd gone to visit him since I moved to NYC at the end of 1999. It's been much easier to convince him to come into The City than to convince me to go to suburban New Jersey. But I figured a visit was well overdue. And Maplewood is much closer--geographically, at least--to NY than I'd thought (about 35 minutes from Penn Station). It was a nice change of pace and scenery for a Saturday afternoon.
We were out there ostensibly to see a showing of Jay's paintings and watercolors at a local gallery housed in a framing shop, but we spent twice as long at a nearby brew pub drinking beers (my favorite was Satan Claws--with an alcohol content of 9%, it was a relative bargain), and playing foosball (Jay's friend Ingrid and I kicked the boys' butts) and a tabletop version of shuffleboard (I didn't fare as well at that).
But don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed Jay's artwork. Initially, I thought his style seemed similar to that of Mark Rothko, though Jay thinks of himself as an abstract landscape artist while Rothko was an abstract expressionist. But after consulting "The 20th Century ArtBook" today, I've decided that Jay's work is more akin to that of the abstract painter whose work influenced (and who befriended) Rothko: Milton Avery. Avery organized his canvas into horizontal bands of layered color, as my stepbrother does. And, like Jay, he takes recognizable images (or landscapes) and dissolves thme into shapes and shadows set off by washes of color.
When it comes to abstract painters, I usually prefer Arshile Gorky or Gerhard Richter (Richter's paintings are among my favorites, though I don't really care for his intentionally fuzzy photographs) because their paintings are less structured and compartmentalized, with the colors spilling into each other and swirling all over the canvas. They are dreamy and emotional and messy. And I see and feel something different each time I look at them.
But I really liked some of Jay's paintings, particularly those he did on the coast of Newfoundland this summer. He slathered oil paint onto wooden boards then scrubbed away the layers until, as he says, "the painting reflects what I see and experience." The process gives the paintings such depth and texture. This is one of my favorites: http://www.jtorson.com/jtpaintingsnew/pages/jt4.htm
Look through the rest. You can judge for yourself who has influenced his work. I just hope that NYC will be as receptive to Jay's paintings now as it was to Avery's and Rothko's in the last century--and that's not just because I'm interested in the resale value of the painting Jay offered to give us as a wedding present.