New Work

Alaina Enslen, Jeanette Fintz, Anne Francey, and Jenny Nelson

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 12 from 5-7pm

June 9, 2021 through August 1, 2021

Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to present “New Work” by a group of four esteemed artists, Alaina Enslen, Jeanette Fintz, Anne Francey and Jenny Nelson. These artists are unified by their response to an intangible inquiry and their ability to charge it with form, structure, and perspective. Stylistically distinct, the featured paintings, drawings and fabric collage tell a story about space and the exploration of color and form. Each artist examines the spectrum of abstraction that exists between expressionism and hard-edge. Fintz, Nelson, and Francey live in the Hudson Valley and have shown with the gallery over ten years, and this will be Enslen’s debut exhibit in Hudson. The exhibit opens June 9th - August 1st with a reception for the artists on Saturday, June 12th from 5-7pm. (We ask that all visitors kindly wear their masks.)


Jenny Nelson will showcase a new series of abstract paintings that explores her continued interest in structure and space. After years of studying academic life drawing, she became intrigued by negative space and started to evolve an abstract language as subject matter was deconstructed and modified. Nelson’s sense of structure and organization remains a mainstay in her abstractions, as layers of oil paint are built up and scraped away to reveal final compositions of gestural color blocks in cool blue palettes with romantic accents of peach or yellow against ethereally neutral backgrounds. This new body of work consists of oil paintings on linen and a series of works on paper. In contrast to the paintings on linen, the works on paper pieces, titled "workstation", are all begun through direct observation and have a warm neutral palette. These pieces either reference the model, or objects around the studio. There is a drawing element that is left visible, and there is an open experimental feeling. These lines from life also find their way into the works on canvas, so the drawing practice and works on paper are a necessary foundation for all the work. Nelson attended Maine College of Art in Portland Maine, and is a graduate of Bard College, where she received a scholarship to the Lacoste School of the Arts in France. She has been living in Woodstock, New York for nearly two decades, including a Residency at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony from November 2004-08.


Jeanette Fintz will present a new series of large-scale paintings, “Balance and Beam - Locus in Transit”, all created during the year of the pandemic. The artist explains “these paintings are about giving structure to something intangible, ephemeral, in-flux or conversely, revealing the dissolving of structure that has been.” As an abstract artist, Fintz has long been interested in the contrast of hard-edged planar geometry (circles, squares, hexagons) existing within an atmospheric field where shapes can float or hold the plane, in a space that appears expansive, transient and increasingly released from the canvas’s edge. A calculated use of opacity and transparency resulting from fluid washes of acrylic create an atmosphere where fragmented geometry becomes “a vocabulary of gestures”. The Blue Mother Drawings are a series of new works on paper that were “inspired by an increased awareness and gratefulness to the natural world for its capacity to heal the spirit during the early days of the pandemic”. Together with a series of 12-inch wood panels called The Green Mother Paintings based on the rotation, scaling and iteration of 6 circles, these two groups honor the greens and blues of a healthy planet that emerged as a positive by-product of the pandemic. A native New Yorker, Fintz currently lives and works in Hudson. She received her MFA from Boston University SFA and her BA from Queens College CUNY. She attended The New York Studio School, and Skowhegan School. Fintz taught Art & Design in the School of Design Strategies at Parson’s New School for Design for 18 years. She is the recipient of the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for painting, the NYFA Fellowship for Works on Paper, the ED Foundation Award for Painting, the Emil & Dines Carlsen Award from the National Academy of Design and is a fellow of the Millay Colony, the MacDowell Colony and Ucross Foundation.


Alaina Enslen expresses her artistic vision through repurposed fabrics infused with beeswax. The Cornwall-On-Hudson based artist collects pieces of textile that evoke memory, tradition, or experience like cherished worn heirlooms, discarded clothes, and religious garments, which are then assembled on panel in an abstract patchwork. Favoring fabrics with a neutral or subtle cool palette, she flattens and frays the material to explore color, form, and lines, reimaging used cloth into something all her own. Enslen has exhibited her work internationally and nationally for over twenty years and is featured in the permanent collections at the West Point Museum and the Paul W. Bryant Museum.


Anne Francey has been working with subject matter inspired by nature for most of her artistic career. Since the pandemic, this focus has become ever more apparent as her new acrylic paintings on paper demonstrate her intuitive process of reinterpreting literal subjects like leaves, flowers, birds, or bugs into vibrant worlds of layered color. She begins by drawing from life but then allows fluctuating colors, traces of the hand, and evidence of the physical medium to be introduced as the composition evolves and finds its final imprint on the surface. The spontaneity of her process welcomes the unknown, she explains: “The things that moved me first…might have become by now just a faint whispering. But I know that a story is being told, even if I don’t understand yet all the words.” Francey lives and works in Saratoga Springs and has shown with the gallery for over twenty years. Born in Switzerland, she went on to receive an MFA from Hunter College and later began teaching studio art at Skidmore College, among other colleges in the Capital region. She also creates community murals in schools and public spaces.

Alaina Enslen


Anne Francey (Painter)


Jeanette Fintz


Jenny Nelson


Susan Stover