Meet & Greet

Two pieces of eye-catching, original art greet guests as they embark on their culinary experience at two of the restaurants at Blackberry Farm and Blackberry Mountain. Andrew Saftel’s art behind the hostess stand at The Barn at Blackberry Farm® greets guests with bright colors and physical items designed into the canvas. Héctor Bitar’s work, set behind the hostess stand at Three Sisters, is an unexpected interpretation of the topography at the Mountain, imagined with a bumpy and captivating finish.

When I work with textures, it’s an experience full of feelings that contrast between the dark and the bright, the deep and the flat, the eccentric and the simple. These entities form something wonderful, aesthetic, powerful and poetic, like life itself.

This work at Blackberry Mountain was created on the basis of a series made in 2016 entitled Quadrivium, a Latin word meaning crossroads. It is made up of a mixed technique of organic materials, cotton waste, alkyd enamels and resins that represent the topographic shape of the property.

It’s my way of capturing nature itself on the canvas – the cosmic world, the divine creation. I don’t have total control of what happens in these works. There are innumerable accidents out of my hands, and that is precisely what makes it beautiful. It is the superior laws and forces that dictate the fine shapes, the same way they do in life and creation in general.

I don´t pretend that the observer thinks or feels something specific when they see my art. Each work has emotional charges of mine, and I know that each person will interpret or feel according to what they bring inside. Everyone sees things with their own filter. I only provide the element to trigger emotions or thoughts.

– Héctor Bitar

Texture is time and how life happens. We experience something, the next experience adds to that, then another on top of that and it becomes a life lived.

In my paintings, I begin by spreading a layer of plaster onto the wood panel with a variety of tools to create texture. I stencil the plaster using patterns both found and invented. I loosely stain the dried plaster with liquid acrylic paint and let the paint flow into the textures randomly. With more discernment, I begin to paint layers of thicker paint over each other. Every layer of paint influences the next until I build up the colors and textures that tell the story in the painting. I want the viewer to experience something in every square inch.

I also create texture by embedding found objects, fabrics and other materials onto the panel. The title Greenhouseis a reference to a place where plants grow. It is also about environmental issues, which are becoming increasingly obvious over time. In this painting, I used part of a found spinning wheel, which represents time – like clockwork. The wheel, which was used by someone to spin yarn, has that person’s life and times within it. Here it has a plant stem with flowers rising from it. On the upper edge of the painting there is a piece of wood with a rope coming out of it that I found on a beach in Maine. At the upper left is an old carpenter’s rule. On the right is a piece of fabric of the type worn by Bedouin women that I bought in the Old City of Jerusalem while on an artists’ exchange there. These objects, remnants from my travels, hold meaning and mark time.

– Andrew Saftel