Art Review – capturing the beauty in nature – Sylvie Covey at Noho

Anyone who loves beauty and botanical prints should rush to Chelsea and see Sylvie Covey’s exhibit. It is another brilliant explosion of colorful imagery from nature, and it’s only open until March 8 at the cooperative Noho M55 Gallery. The French-born Covey is one of the most important printmakers in the world.

Her book Modern Printmaking : A Guide to Traditional and Digital Techniques  is considered the definitive tome on the subject and was recently updated for a new edition. She is also the author of Photoshop for Artists: A Complete Guide for Fine Artists, Photographers, and Printmakers. Both are published by Watson-Guptil

Neither of these books is light reading, as the titles indicate. They both serve as textbooks in art schools everywhere. This makes sense once you know that Covey is a much-loved and long-time instructor at the Art Students League in Manhattan. She also teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she was instrumental in establishing the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree program.

Sylvie Covey came to Manhattan in late 1977 as a young hippie artist, after vagabonding around the world. That sort of thing was somehow much more acceptable and doable in those days.

She had studied printmaking at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France, which is the city of her birth. Through friends from the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, she found a loft just off Times Square, which she still occupies and maintains as her Manhattan residence and print studio. A widow, she also spends time on her farm in Upstate New York.

I love flowers — growing them, admiring them, and enjoying them in works of art. Maybe my fascination stems from my daily mediation practice or is rooted (all puns intended) in my childhood on a fruit farm. I also feel compelled to emphasize beauty whenever I can these days, with all the ongoing nastiness and endless strife and discontent constantly bombarding us. In any case, I always have time to enjoy botanical prints, doubly so if it is an exhibition of Sylvie Covey’s spectacular work.

In her last exhibit, at a Chashama space in Manhattan, Covey showed a series of prints made while she isolated on her farm. (NOTE: Chashama is the organization founded by real estate heiress Anita Durst. Empty store fronts and other spaces are provided rent-free for artists to present pop up exhibits.) For that series Covey created her own dyes from nature.

“For this series I needed to come back to the fluidity of inks and the primal texture of canvas,” according to Covey’s statement accompanying the show. “I prepare my canvas with a gold or silver base and then work with different ink transfer methods and ink washes. From the depth of darkness to ephemeral luminosity, my goal is to reflect on the micro-second of our being, in the fusion of Earth and Space.”

These are not your granny’s botanical prints (as wonderful as granny’s may be). Each is an individual work of art, an edition of one, if you will. Some of them verge toward abstraction. “This body of work arises from a series of watercolor monotypes of flowers and organic matter, layered with images of the universe in space,” states Covey.

With all the fretting over language and gender these days, it’s a shame no one has coined a gender-neutral term to replace “mastery.” For now, let me say that Sylvie Covey is an artist in complete control of her métier. She’s as brilliant as these works are beautiful.