THE NAKED TRUTH

The term "naked truth" refers to the complete truth, without any embellishments
or cover-ups. It signifies the unvarnished reality of a situation or information.
The naked truth is synonymous with concepts
such as honest truth, plain truth, straight truth, and unqualified truth.
This expression supposedly alludes to a fable in which Truth and Falsehood
went bathing, Falsehood then dressed in Truth's clothes, and Truth,
refusing to take another's clothes, went naked.
Works by Lisa Bartolozzi, Mary Page Evans, Rebecca Raubacher, and Stephen Tanis
explore humanity from their unique perceptions.

May 3 - June 29, 2024
Opening Receptions: May 3rd, 5-8 pm, May 4th, 2-5 pm
June 7th, 5-8 pm

Lisa Bartolozzi

Artist Statement for ‘The Susanna Series’

Truth and Falsehood went bathing, Falsehood dressed in Truth’s clothes, and Truth, refusing to take another’s clothes, went naked.

-Anonymous

Now then, if thou hast seen her, tell me, Under what tree sawest thou the companying together?

- History of Susanna,

 Book of Daniel

This ongoing series of drawings and paintings was inspired by the History of Susanna, an apocryphal story from the Book of Daniel.  This Biblical tale has often been a theme explored in Western Art History as Susanna and The Elders.  As Truth chose to be Naked, Susanna had no choice but to become naked in her vulnerability as a woman in a patriarchal society. The safety of her private garden having been violated by two lecherous elders, exposed her to a decimation of her character, and a threat to her very life.  In numerous paintings often created for the male gaze, Susanna’s state of undress could be viewed as ‘naked’, verses ‘nude’, just as her response was often one of passivity and an object of desire. 

 In sharing this story with my models, some of whom were friends or professional artist models, we explored numerous concepts of the story:

I           The joy and enjoyment of bathing one’s body while enclosed in own’s private garden.

II          The initial awareness of a threat or intrusion.

III         The unfiltered reaction to the violation.

IV         Confronting the violence with freedom and resolution.

 The Susanna story ends when the Child prophet, Daniel, exposed the Naked Truth of Susanna’s innocence and justice prevailed through divine intervention, creating a Morality Tale. One can also interpret this story about the vigilance needed to correct the unjust thoughts we subject our mind into believing about our bodies. The ‘enclosed garden’ can symbolize an innocent state of mind about one’s own body temple.   At any point in one’s lifetime, violations, coming both from without and within, assault our consciousness, corrupt our self-image, and create beliefs that do not serve us.

Mary Page Evans

In 1984, artist Gene Davis described Mary Page Evans’ paintings as, “hymns of unadulterated joy.” While Evans paints still lifes and images of the human form, it is her landscape and garden paintings created directly from nature, en plein air that capture this sentiment. Evans exhibits in Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. She has artwork in numerous public and private collections such as: the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Delaware Art Museum,  Brandywine River Museum of Art, and the State Museum of Pennsylvania.

“I am primarily a landscape painter. I work directly from nature – en plein air. I look at a specific landscape, establish its locale, the time of day, the quality of light, and paint it. Becoming involved with its particularities, I get to know it as if I were painting a figure or a still life. During the process, I am always creating and destroying until I arrive at the inevitability of this particular landscape. I am very interested in the line — studying the way nature draws . Drawing the nude increases my visual vocabulary !

Art history has always played an important role in my work. Having absorbed the structural lessons of Cezanne and the “push-pull” principle of Hans Hoffman, I try to loosen the form and let color determine the structure and create the space. I strive for a visual back and forth in the space resulting from forms and colors reacting to each other – like music. Cézanne once said, “Painting from nature is not copying the object, but realizing ones sensations.” When I paint the landscape, I feel like singing.”

Rebecca Raubacher

“As a child, I believed that if I could draw something, I could somehow own it. Now, I feel like the work owns me. The art of drawing has reached in and pulled this work, like a secret from my core, and then delivered it to me, allowing others viewing it to bring their own stories.”

Rebecca Raubacher graduated from Maryland College of Art and Design with a Certificate of Fine Arts and from Delaware State University with a Bachelor of Science in Art Education, both with honors. After graduation, the Delaware State Arts Council awarded her a Fellowship for Painting and over the years her work has received awards and recognition from numerous sources including Howard Fox –curator at Hirshhorn Museum; Nancy Hoffman of Nancy Hoffman Gallery; David Tannous of Art in America; Grace Glueck art critic for the New York Times; Townsend Wolfe Art Director, the Arkansas Arts Center; Susan Krane, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the High Museum of art; and Patterson Sims, curator from the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Stephen Tanis

"Observational drawing has been a constant in my life as an artist and has always given me firm direction in my approach to subject and content. My love of drawing is the main reason that I am an artist. 

Still-life and, especially, the human figure are satisfying ways for me to explore a very controlled world of my own aesthetic design and invention."

Stephen Tanis is a painter and Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware where he taught both painting and drawing in the Department of Art for nearly thirty years. He received a BFA from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Tanis has been the recipient of three individual artist fellowships from the Delaware State Arts Council: the first for painting, the second for works-on-paper, and the third, a Masters fellowship in 2002 for painting. In that same year, Tanis received a Delaware Governor’s Award in the Arts. He has also received individual fellowships from the Hereward Lester Cooke Foundation and the John F. and Anna Lee Stacey Foundation. Tanis has had over twenty five solo exhibitions of his work in galleries and museums including eight shows at the Sherry French Gallery in New York City and six shows at the Jane Haslem Gallery in Washington, DC.

In 2009, Stephen Tanis was honored with a retrospective show at the University of Delaware Museum that spanned forty-one years of his painting. His work is included in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, the UK and Europe.