FROM THE BRONX TO THE BAY: PAINTINGS OF PHILIP ROSENFELD

The exhibition can be viewed
June 5 through August 29, 2009

Opening reception:
Friday June 5, 6:30 - 7:30 pm
following 5:30 Shabbat Services

The artist’s son Seth Rosenfeld
will speak during the Services.

“The trick to painting, and one could say to all things, is to achieve a certain goal –
and that goal is to have divine fire. The painting has to have soul”

–Philip Rosenfeld

Marin County painter Philip Rosenfeld, now in his eighties, was born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx.
He began drawing at a young age. At age 12 he had to start working after school – first in a neighborhood tailor shop, then as a “marker” in the garment district, where his job was to mark with a crayon the goods to be cut. It was 1938, and the industry was by then fully unionized, with worker protections in place. By age 14, Philip’s artistic talent was noticed. He won a scholarship at the historic Art Student’s League of New York. Among his instructors were the painters Morris Kantor, Yahso Kuniashi and Will Barnet, who encouraged the young artist to work in oils.


Unfortunately, as Philip entered adulthood, painting had to take a back seat. He joined the North 7th Assembly District of the American Labor Party and became an activist for workplace integration. He married and raised two sons, continuing to paint in the attic of their home in Syracuse. It wasn’t until Rosenfeld moved to Northern California in 1972 that he began to paint full-time.

Like Cezanne in Provence, he found his aesthetic home in the countryside. Inspired by the terrain, the light and color of Marin County, he became a painter of luminous landscapes and color-charged abstract canvases. Represented in this exhibit are examples from Philip Rosenfeld’s compelling series “Faces of the American Labor Movement,” which is comprised of twenty powerful oil portraits of key female labor leaders from the 1920s and 1930s, and the abstract paintings from the “From the Bronx to the Bay.” These series encompass Rosenfeld’s life in art and bring together his convictions and his artistry.
It is the work of a lifetime.