TORCH
An artist-to-artist exhibition
Franklin Faust - Sarah A. Pletts - Brian Martin Brooks
Two former Pratt Institute students rediscover links that connect their art to their painting teacher
and the story of Henri Matisse's lost letters
'Henri's Letters' - a performance
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Franklin Faust - 'Still Life with Mirror' - watercolour on paper
Franklin Faust was seventeen in 1946 when Sarah (known as ‘Sally’) Stein read him her letters from Henri Matisse. Sally and her husband Michael Stein were Matisse’s oldest and foremost patrons. Their California home was full of modern paintings. The young Faust was immersed in an extraordinary artistic experience that marked the onset of his own career.
Then, as a teacher at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Faust in turn inspired his students to paint with luminous colors, use rare pigments, to perceive the canvas like the crust of the earth, with light refracting through layers of color.
Forty years later, two of his students - Brian and Sarah - met up in London and realized how their teacher’s commitment to craft and his passion for exploration had inspired their work as life-long artists.
Torch Exhibition Description
For Faust, Pletts and Brooks painting with luminous color evolves human existence. Hours of hand-to-eye concentration enjoin them with the natural world. Focusing on light and color ignites consciousness and changes how the human brain functions.
The eternal human desire to seek and express the exquisite beauty around us comes down through these three generations. Many of their paints are made of natural raw materials. The skill of putting color on a surface by the human hand connects us directly to our environment.
In this twenty-first century of digital color where are we headed?
Exhibition features
Painting (watercolor, oil, acryllic and mixed media)
Installation (video, music, sound and vertical light beams) by the artists.
Video interviews with the artists.
Interactive Media
Visitors to the exhibition enter through the world of Paris in 1904, travel onto California in 1941 to the present, then the future. Viewers also compare virtual copies of some exhibition paintings on personal electronic devices with the real works of art.
This exhibition also includes an interactive workspace where all who wish, dip a brush in color paint and put it on paper. Through an optional live video feed, the viewer/live painter may become the current artist displayed on a monitor in the gallery/museum.
There is also a digital device available for designing and playing with virtual color. Viewers play with and compare painting by hand and electronic manipulation of color. Adobe’s “Cutout” Program is compared to the progression of “PAUL,” one of Mr. Brooks' portrait paintings.
Each host city will create a video expressing their desires for the future of art. What is your perspective?
Theatrical Performance at openings
In words and images Ms. Pletts performs Sarah Stein from Paris (with Gertrude) to Sarah in California reading Matisse’s letters with seventeen-year-old Franklin Faust. They sit together next to a recreation of the large steamer trunk that was in her Palo Alto, California entryway. It was full of Henri Matisse’s wallpaper samples, fabrics, rugs and letters.
Henri Matisse wrote this to Sarah Stein the day she left France in 1935:
“I had hoped . . . I could have spoken again with you of the past, to tell you how vivid my memories remain of my ardent years of work. . . during which you and Mr. Stein supported me so much, with tireless devotion - , and since, of the pleasure that I had in showing you my work. . .how much I valued your wise judgements, guided by your exceptional sensibility, and full knowledge of the road I have traveled. . . true friends are so rare that it is painful to see them move away.”
Sarah and Henri wrote to each other until her death in 1953.
Contacts and links
Sarah A. Pletts - Telephone: 970.925.7018 USA
Brian Martin Brooks -
Sarah A. Pletts IMDB
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