"The
Family Curse" The Angelochs of Woodstock
By Jay Blotcher
When
the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum contacted artist Eric
Angeloch about mounting a father-son show, it seemed a neat and
logical premise. Angeloch, 47, is a second-generation visual artist
and the son of Robert Angeloch, 85, an accomplished painter and
founder of the Woodstock School of Art. Angeloch the Younger was
instructed to select a variety of his own landscapes, an equal number
of his father’s figure drawings and landscapes, and create
an exhibition that would prompt a spirited discussion on genetics
and artistic style.
But
the board of WAAM had not reckoned fully before approaching Eric
Angeloch. An instructor at the Woodstock School of Art, Eric can
lay claim to an artistic lineage that expands beyond the work of
his accomplished father. His mother Nancy Summers, 79, is an award-winning
painter with her own formidable family line: Her late parents, Dudley
Gloyne Summers and Pauline Stone were successful illustrators—she
of bookplates and children’s books, he for books and magazines—in
the early 20th century.
The
original concept having swelled from showcasing two artists to celebrating
the lives of five artists joined by bloodlines and, in numerous
ways, aesthetics. Eric, who has a decided taste for wordplay, has
entitled the three-generation, fifty-work retrospective “The
Family Curse: The Angelochs and Summers of Woodstock.” The
show will run from July 14 through August 19 at WAAM.
On
a Sunday afternoon in June, Angeloch is still reviewing paintings
and illustrations for the proposed show. Canvases by his relatives,
some liberated from a cellar after decades, sit propped against
walls in the artist’s Woodstock home-studio. In the nine months
since he was first asked to consider the exhibition, Angeloch estimates
that he has reviewed several hundred art pieces. “There’s
absolutely a ton of work.”CONTINUE....
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