About the Gallery
ORDOVER GALLERY SANTA FE
Location: 222 Delgado Street (at Canyon)
Santa Fe, New Mexico 80751
Phone: (505) 467-8815
Hours: Tuesday (closed)
Wednesday - Saturday 10:00am to 5:00pm
Sunday- 11:00am to 5:00pm
and by appointment
ORDOVER GALLERY SOLANA BEACH
Location: 410 S. Cedros, Solana Beach, CA 92075
Phone: (858) 720-1121
Hours: Monday: closed
Tuesday - Thursday: 11 am to 4:30 pm
Friday: noon to 5 pm
Saturday: 10 am to 5 pm
Sunday: noon to 5 pm
ORDOVER GALLERY AT THE SAN DIEGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
Location: San Diego Natural History Museum, 4th Floor; 1788 El Prado, Balboa Park
Phone: (858) 720-1121
Hours: 10 am to 5 pm, every day
Location: 222 Delgado Street (at Canyon)
Santa Fe, New Mexico 80751
Phone: (505) 467-8815
Hours: Tuesday (closed)
Wednesday - Saturday 10:00am to 5:00pm
Sunday- 11:00am to 5:00pm
and by appointment
ORDOVER GALLERY SOLANA BEACH
Location: 410 S. Cedros, Solana Beach, CA 92075
Phone: (858) 720-1121
Hours: Monday: closed
Tuesday - Thursday: 11 am to 4:30 pm
Friday: noon to 5 pm
Saturday: 10 am to 5 pm
Sunday: noon to 5 pm
ORDOVER GALLERY AT THE SAN DIEGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
Location: San Diego Natural History Museum, 4th Floor; 1788 El Prado, Balboa Park
Phone: (858) 720-1121
Hours: 10 am to 5 pm, every day
Lisa Ross
Lisa Ross is an award winning writer and fine art photographer. A graduate of the University of Southern California in Communications, she trained in the fine art of photography at the prestigious Hamilton High Photography Department in Los Angeles. It was there that Ansel Adams and Bob Willoughby awarded her top honors.
An allergy to darkroom chemicals led her down a different path, first as a psychotherapist and then as a political writer and consultant. Her commentaries have appeared in the nation’s top newspapers and on radio. Her widely read column, The Ross Retort, was the recipent of numerous San Diego Press Club awards and honors from the Society of Professional Journalists.
The dawn of the digital darkroom brought Lisa back to fine art photography a decade ago. With images shot in the world’s most visually interesting places, her goal is to achieve the feel of a painting while retaining the immediacy of the photograph. Her technique makes use of original digitized negatives or digital images printed with inkjet archival pigment on large-sized canvas.
It is not unusual to find customers perplexed at whether a work is a painting or a photograph--she works to create pieces that demolish the line between the mediums.
“I want the work to hang in spaces where people live, so the pieces must connect with inidividual aesthetics and at the same time evoke an instant of time and place.”
Lisa travels the world for inspiration. Available works cover six continents. In 2005 she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and tracked Mountain Gorillas in Uganda. Later that year took her on a 6000-mile rail journey across the Russian Far East, Siberia and Mongolia to Moscow,. Then to Antarctica and South America, including the Amazon and the Inca Trail in Peru.
She has traversed North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia for her latest shows. Early 2009 included a return to the Balkans, Italy, Greece and Turkey. This year, she covers seven countries in Central Asia.
As she likes to say, if anyone is looking for a piece from a favorite place, Lisa is the first person they should ask.
An allergy to darkroom chemicals led her down a different path, first as a psychotherapist and then as a political writer and consultant. Her commentaries have appeared in the nation’s top newspapers and on radio. Her widely read column, The Ross Retort, was the recipent of numerous San Diego Press Club awards and honors from the Society of Professional Journalists.
The dawn of the digital darkroom brought Lisa back to fine art photography a decade ago. With images shot in the world’s most visually interesting places, her goal is to achieve the feel of a painting while retaining the immediacy of the photograph. Her technique makes use of original digitized negatives or digital images printed with inkjet archival pigment on large-sized canvas.
It is not unusual to find customers perplexed at whether a work is a painting or a photograph--she works to create pieces that demolish the line between the mediums.
“I want the work to hang in spaces where people live, so the pieces must connect with inidividual aesthetics and at the same time evoke an instant of time and place.”
Lisa travels the world for inspiration. Available works cover six continents. In 2005 she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and tracked Mountain Gorillas in Uganda. Later that year took her on a 6000-mile rail journey across the Russian Far East, Siberia and Mongolia to Moscow,. Then to Antarctica and South America, including the Amazon and the Inca Trail in Peru.
She has traversed North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia for her latest shows. Early 2009 included a return to the Balkans, Italy, Greece and Turkey. This year, she covers seven countries in Central Asia.
As she likes to say, if anyone is looking for a piece from a favorite place, Lisa is the first person they should ask.
Abe Ordover
Abe Ordover is a lawyer by trade who practiced in New York City before moving into a law teaching career which he pursued for twenty years. Thereafter, he became a nationally known mediator. He mediated about 1,500 cases.
He has pursued his photographic craft for 25 years, becoming a professional in 2000. He has had solo gallery shows in New York City, Atlanta, San Diego and Palo Alto; solo exhibitions in university museums including the University of Colorado and Georgia Tech; and major one man shows at the Parthenon Museum in Nashville, and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. He has been featured in museums in Athens, Dallas, Raleigh, Tallahassee, and in municipal museums in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.
He is best known for his radiant water reflection work and for his impressionist approach to nature imagery.
Ordover's abstract images are featured in the opening exhibition at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art in New York City.
"I am seeking to convey the emotion I felt when I stepped into the scene. The image must do it for me. At times I express feeling with the use of color. At other times, I use texture and color. If the rhythm of life is the subject, the patterns of nature are used. These may be ripples in a pond, the current of a river, the striations in rock or wood, reflections in water, or the light on a scene at daybreak or sunset.
The computer gives me an emotional, dramatic lens. Art is always a personal statement. Every period, every culture has created a way to portray the natural world, which is so much a part of us. The tools we use are those available at the time. Conceptually, it does not matter whether we use a piece of charcoal or computer software."
Critical Quotes
"Abraham Ordover's artistic goal is not merely to document the landscape but somehow to represent the feelings that he experienced in nature, whether it has been in the deserts of the American Southwest or on the ice floes of Antarctica, on the Kenyan veldt or in a Maine harbor. The abstract qualities of his photographs reinforce that, making him more an impressionist than a realist. Ordover takes what has been recorded and heightens the visual experience and the emotional tone."
Karen S. Chambers
"Ordover's unique combination of camera work in the field and computer work in the studio transform both the strange and familiar aspects of nature into subjects of intrigue . . .their real power comes from his deep love of the gestures of our natural world, and from his keen intuition for the kind of enduring image, which can merge from a quickly disappearing world."
Brent McCullough
"Ordover is communicating the overwhelming emotional experience that was his meeting with the river. The grand moments in all of our lives are embellished. The peak experiences are the kind that change one’s life, and Abe Ordover captures them."
William Zimmer, The New York Times
He has pursued his photographic craft for 25 years, becoming a professional in 2000. He has had solo gallery shows in New York City, Atlanta, San Diego and Palo Alto; solo exhibitions in university museums including the University of Colorado and Georgia Tech; and major one man shows at the Parthenon Museum in Nashville, and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. He has been featured in museums in Athens, Dallas, Raleigh, Tallahassee, and in municipal museums in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.
He is best known for his radiant water reflection work and for his impressionist approach to nature imagery.
Ordover's abstract images are featured in the opening exhibition at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art in New York City.
"I am seeking to convey the emotion I felt when I stepped into the scene. The image must do it for me. At times I express feeling with the use of color. At other times, I use texture and color. If the rhythm of life is the subject, the patterns of nature are used. These may be ripples in a pond, the current of a river, the striations in rock or wood, reflections in water, or the light on a scene at daybreak or sunset.
The computer gives me an emotional, dramatic lens. Art is always a personal statement. Every period, every culture has created a way to portray the natural world, which is so much a part of us. The tools we use are those available at the time. Conceptually, it does not matter whether we use a piece of charcoal or computer software."
Critical Quotes
"Abraham Ordover's artistic goal is not merely to document the landscape but somehow to represent the feelings that he experienced in nature, whether it has been in the deserts of the American Southwest or on the ice floes of Antarctica, on the Kenyan veldt or in a Maine harbor. The abstract qualities of his photographs reinforce that, making him more an impressionist than a realist. Ordover takes what has been recorded and heightens the visual experience and the emotional tone."
Karen S. Chambers
"Ordover's unique combination of camera work in the field and computer work in the studio transform both the strange and familiar aspects of nature into subjects of intrigue . . .their real power comes from his deep love of the gestures of our natural world, and from his keen intuition for the kind of enduring image, which can merge from a quickly disappearing world."
Brent McCullough
"Ordover is communicating the overwhelming emotional experience that was his meeting with the river. The grand moments in all of our lives are embellished. The peak experiences are the kind that change one’s life, and Abe Ordover captures them."
William Zimmer, The New York Times
Saphire Sandy Freshour
Sandy Freshour, who shows under the name Saphire Sandy, is an abstract figurative painter and conceptual dichroic glass and silver jewelry designer.
An emotive artist, she creates paintings that draw the viewer in - one begins to contemplate the abstract figures that seemingly interweave, sway and meld into one another. Vibrant bursts of unexpected color move across the canvas in surges of emotion.
Saphire's work attempts to reconcile figuration and abstraction. She does this at our most intimate site of interaction with the world around us: the body. Here, the familiar forms of torsos, limbs and faces become elongated and shortened. Fleeting moments of light are captured in her choice of colors. It is as though we are looking into a mirror that doesn't reflect what we want to see in ourselves, but what is actually there in the moments between seconds.
The spatial constraints of the body fight and blend with the background, melding the here and the there, allowing the figures to exist as both autonomous entities and flowing members of each space. Her work forces us to reexamine the body and see it as though it was for the first time every time.
"I see each painting before I paint it. My work is a reflection of what is inside of me, and off shoot of my emotions. A painting might start off positive, but as I work, my emotions may change and so does the emerging piece."
An emotive artist, she creates paintings that draw the viewer in - one begins to contemplate the abstract figures that seemingly interweave, sway and meld into one another. Vibrant bursts of unexpected color move across the canvas in surges of emotion.
Saphire's work attempts to reconcile figuration and abstraction. She does this at our most intimate site of interaction with the world around us: the body. Here, the familiar forms of torsos, limbs and faces become elongated and shortened. Fleeting moments of light are captured in her choice of colors. It is as though we are looking into a mirror that doesn't reflect what we want to see in ourselves, but what is actually there in the moments between seconds.
The spatial constraints of the body fight and blend with the background, melding the here and the there, allowing the figures to exist as both autonomous entities and flowing members of each space. Her work forces us to reexamine the body and see it as though it was for the first time every time.
"I see each painting before I paint it. My work is a reflection of what is inside of me, and off shoot of my emotions. A painting might start off positive, but as I work, my emotions may change and so does the emerging piece."
David Fokos
The images I make today are the result of 30 years of exploration and discovery in my quest to understand how we are affected by the world around us and how we perceive our environment. My images are not so much about what is seen but rather what is felt. They are the result of my desire to express to the viewer the essence of my experience in these places.
Some of my thoughts on this subject get quite technical and I have been known to prattle on about the wavelength of light, etc. However, to put it simply, I believe that our sense of experience is built up over time – a composite of many short-term events. I will often suggest this analogy: Suppose you meet someone for the first time. Your impression of that person is not a snapshot in your mind of the first time you saw that person, but rather a portrait you have assembled from many separate moments. Each time that person exhibits a new facial expression or hand gesture, you add that into your impression of who that person is. Your image of that person -- how you feel about that person -- is formed over time, rather than upon a single expression or gesture.
Likewise, I believe that our impression of the world is based upon our total experience. For example, the ocean has always made me feel calm, relaxed, and contented. If I were to take an instantaneous snapshot of the ocean, the photo would include waves with jagged edges, salt spray, and foam. This type of image does not make me feel calm -- it does not represent how the ocean makes me feel as I stare out over the water. What I am responding to is the underlying, fundamental form of the ocean, its vast expansiveness and the strong line of the horizon, both of which are very stable, calming forms.
It took me a long time to understand this – 15 years during which my images failed to evoke the emotions I wished to communicate. Then, slowly, I began to sense some change in a few of my shots. And while not entirely successful, there were areas within these shots that hinted at what I was trying to express. I spent a lot of time contemplating why it was that these images were more successful for me than others. Drawing upon my technical background in engineering and a profound, decades-long appreciation and interest in Japanese aesthetics, I began to develop my own theory of how we perceive the world and a method for expressing that through my art.
For scenes that contain a lot of movement I have used the camera’s unique ability to “average time” through long exposures ranging from 20 seconds to 60 minutes, to reveal what is felt but generally unseen. This process eliminates what I have termed “visual noise”. These are all the short-term temporal events (i.e., things that are moving) that can distract us from focusing on the underlying fundamental forms. In such scenes, my long exposures strip away this noise. In a way, it is like peeling back a page to reveal a world that, while very real, is not experienced visually. We feel it. We sense it. But in general, we don’t see it.
When a scene does not contain movement, a simple instantaneous exposure is sufficient, as a longer exposure would make no difference. The key to these images, much like my time-averaged images, is to frame the shot in such a way as to emphasize what I wish to share and minimize the rest -- to remove distractions, to remove the visual noise.
When I make an image I know exactly on what I want the viewer to focus and what I want them to see and feel. By reducing my images to austere minimalist compositions I force the viewer to more closely examine what I have left in the frame.
In this regard, my study of Japanese aesthetic traditions has had a profound influence on my work. At university, I studied Japanese art history, Japanese film, and haiku poetry. I have been greatly inspired by the haiku poet’s ability to convey deeply felt sentiment through a minimal number of words.
For centuries Zen Buddhists have known this too. A famous story is told of the Zen Buddhist Tea Master Rikyu, here recounted by Kakuzo from "The Book of Tea":
In the 16th Century the morning glory was as yet a rare plant with us. Rikyu had an entire garden planted with it, which he cultivated with assiduous care. The fame of his convolvuli reached the ear of the Taiko, and he expressed a desire to see them, in consequence of which Rikyu invited him to morning tea at his house. On the appointed day the Taiko walked through the garden, but nowhere could he see any vestige of the convolvulus. The ground had been leveled and strewn with fine pebbles and sand. With sullen anger the despot entered the tea room, but a sight waited him there which completely restored his humour. On the tokonoma, in a rare bronze of Sung workmanship, lay a single morning glory -- the queen of the whole garden!
With my work I do not consciously set out to make “photographic haiku,” or try to illustrate such concepts as seijaku (tranquility), sabi (patina and an appreciation of the ephemeral nature of things), yūgen (an unobvious, subtle, profound grace), shizen (without pretense), and wabi (rustic simplicity, freshness, quietness, an appreciation of imperfection). Yet, I feel that the spirit expressed in these concepts resonates within my images. It was through my work, as I struggled to make the first image that I felt successfully conveyed the emotion I wished to share, that these ideals came to reveal themselves to me.
It is my hope that, in looking at my work, you may share with me the experience of these places.
Some of my thoughts on this subject get quite technical and I have been known to prattle on about the wavelength of light, etc. However, to put it simply, I believe that our sense of experience is built up over time – a composite of many short-term events. I will often suggest this analogy: Suppose you meet someone for the first time. Your impression of that person is not a snapshot in your mind of the first time you saw that person, but rather a portrait you have assembled from many separate moments. Each time that person exhibits a new facial expression or hand gesture, you add that into your impression of who that person is. Your image of that person -- how you feel about that person -- is formed over time, rather than upon a single expression or gesture.
Likewise, I believe that our impression of the world is based upon our total experience. For example, the ocean has always made me feel calm, relaxed, and contented. If I were to take an instantaneous snapshot of the ocean, the photo would include waves with jagged edges, salt spray, and foam. This type of image does not make me feel calm -- it does not represent how the ocean makes me feel as I stare out over the water. What I am responding to is the underlying, fundamental form of the ocean, its vast expansiveness and the strong line of the horizon, both of which are very stable, calming forms.
It took me a long time to understand this – 15 years during which my images failed to evoke the emotions I wished to communicate. Then, slowly, I began to sense some change in a few of my shots. And while not entirely successful, there were areas within these shots that hinted at what I was trying to express. I spent a lot of time contemplating why it was that these images were more successful for me than others. Drawing upon my technical background in engineering and a profound, decades-long appreciation and interest in Japanese aesthetics, I began to develop my own theory of how we perceive the world and a method for expressing that through my art.
For scenes that contain a lot of movement I have used the camera’s unique ability to “average time” through long exposures ranging from 20 seconds to 60 minutes, to reveal what is felt but generally unseen. This process eliminates what I have termed “visual noise”. These are all the short-term temporal events (i.e., things that are moving) that can distract us from focusing on the underlying fundamental forms. In such scenes, my long exposures strip away this noise. In a way, it is like peeling back a page to reveal a world that, while very real, is not experienced visually. We feel it. We sense it. But in general, we don’t see it.
When a scene does not contain movement, a simple instantaneous exposure is sufficient, as a longer exposure would make no difference. The key to these images, much like my time-averaged images, is to frame the shot in such a way as to emphasize what I wish to share and minimize the rest -- to remove distractions, to remove the visual noise.
When I make an image I know exactly on what I want the viewer to focus and what I want them to see and feel. By reducing my images to austere minimalist compositions I force the viewer to more closely examine what I have left in the frame.
In this regard, my study of Japanese aesthetic traditions has had a profound influence on my work. At university, I studied Japanese art history, Japanese film, and haiku poetry. I have been greatly inspired by the haiku poet’s ability to convey deeply felt sentiment through a minimal number of words.
For centuries Zen Buddhists have known this too. A famous story is told of the Zen Buddhist Tea Master Rikyu, here recounted by Kakuzo from "The Book of Tea":
In the 16th Century the morning glory was as yet a rare plant with us. Rikyu had an entire garden planted with it, which he cultivated with assiduous care. The fame of his convolvuli reached the ear of the Taiko, and he expressed a desire to see them, in consequence of which Rikyu invited him to morning tea at his house. On the appointed day the Taiko walked through the garden, but nowhere could he see any vestige of the convolvulus. The ground had been leveled and strewn with fine pebbles and sand. With sullen anger the despot entered the tea room, but a sight waited him there which completely restored his humour. On the tokonoma, in a rare bronze of Sung workmanship, lay a single morning glory -- the queen of the whole garden!
With my work I do not consciously set out to make “photographic haiku,” or try to illustrate such concepts as seijaku (tranquility), sabi (patina and an appreciation of the ephemeral nature of things), yūgen (an unobvious, subtle, profound grace), shizen (without pretense), and wabi (rustic simplicity, freshness, quietness, an appreciation of imperfection). Yet, I feel that the spirit expressed in these concepts resonates within my images. It was through my work, as I struggled to make the first image that I felt successfully conveyed the emotion I wished to share, that these ideals came to reveal themselves to me.
It is my hope that, in looking at my work, you may share with me the experience of these places.
Curator Faith Page
Faith Page is the Santa Fe gallery curator. A well-known singer as well, she manages the day to day operations of the gallery. She previously managed the Moseley Gallery in Santa Fe.