Axelrod/Levine-Keating Show at Longyear

By Jenny Neal

MARGARETVILLE — Last Saturday August 9th 2025 saw the opening reception of two solo shows at the Longyear Gallery in Margaretville: Robert Axelrod’s “Local Color”, and Helane Levine-Keating’s “Patterns of Recognition”. Both sets of works are representative of the natural world.

Robert’s oil paintings are all Catskills landscapes: think rich greens, deep blues, and the traditional rust-red barns, but it’s the trees that are really the stars of his world. In this body of work, Robert seems to have laid the paint on more thickly and the effect is a more luscious, dreamy rendering than previous works. The light evokes glorious Catskills summers and you can almost feel the warm breeze under their canopies.

Robert has been painting in the Catskills for 30 years, mostly in spring, summer and early autumn - mild weather.

Robert studied design in college. “Lucky kid”, he says. “I went to the High School of Music and Art, so we have very good instructors. Then I studied print-making, and I have a Masters in Art Education”. He paints regularly, but hasn’t taught art in a while (“informally yes, but formally no”). He also paints in watercolor and was the past President of the Brooklyn Watercolor Society. Asked which medium he prefers, he says oil.

“I’d like very much to do more figurative work but I haven’t had the opportunity. People are reluctant to sit for a long period of time”.

What’s his favorite spot in the Catskills? “Oh, you can’t pick a favorite, you know that” he responds. “It’s a question of the time of day. A place you could go by a million times and not notice. One day you’ll see something about it. The clouds might be in the right place at the right time of day or the right season, and you’ll say oh my goodness, isn’t this beautiful?”

“I think of a painting as a three-way conversation. The first is the motif itself, as one participant. The second is the artist’s response to the motif. The third is what gets put down on the canvas, let’s say the artist responds to the marks he makes back and forth as the painting develops in reference to the motif that attracted the painter in the first place. The fourth element if you want one is the third party looking at the painting that decides - this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. Or, he got it”.

Helane’s photographs are more of a mineral nature: stone walls and mist-covered mountains. There’s a dreamy aspect to Helane’s work too; the interplay between the elements - air and rock - the ethereal and the concrete, so to speak.

Of this latest exhibition, she says: “over my years of photographing landscapes and the outdoors, recurrent patterns have drawn me to look closely and notice correspondences. Having had the opportunity to travel far from the Catskills at different times during 2024-2025, I took many of the photographs in this new exhibition during visits to Ireland; Martha’s Vineyard, MA; Lake Winnipesaukee, NH; Abu Dhabi; and Greece. Several were taken closer to home in the New Kingston Valley near my house in the hamlet”.

For Helane, “the recognizable patterns in landscapes separated by time and space, including trees, stones, clouds, storms, and hand-made structures, reflect human connectedness, spirituality, practicality, aesthetics, and labor over time. Despite cultural differences, correspondences emerge between the stone walls in my photographs, all having survived time, weather and war for millennia. Whether they were built to divide farmlands and fields or to worship the Ancient Greek gods or house the people who lived there, these walls evoke a beauty even in what remains”.

Helane began studying and practicing her own photography in 1978 while completing a PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University, and, after moving to New Kingston, NY in 1989, became the "unofficial" photographer for the New Kingston Valley Association from 1990-2000. During those years her photographs often appeared in the Catskill Mountain News, and since 2001, she has printed her own fine art photographs. In November 2007, Helane became a member of the Longyear Gallery in Margaretville, NY, participating in monthly group shows since joining the gallery.

She is also a writer and professor at Pace University in addition to being a fine art photographer, having published several books, and works of poetry and fiction. Asked whether she considers herself a poet or an artist, she says the two are intertwined: “I don’t separate them. I use photography often in my teaching of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. The imagery that appears in my poetry and the photographic images in this show come from the same eyes”.

The Longyear Gallery, 785 Main Street, Margaretville, NY 12455. www.longyeargallery.org Gallery opening times: Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays 12pm - 5pm. Robert Axelrod and Helane Levine-Keating will show until September 7th, 2025.