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Gallery Art Show

UNDERSTORY

Bergen
Midland Park Memorial Library

The Midland Park Memorial Library is pleased to showcase Understory, an exhibition by local artist Geraldine Abdoo.

Oct 5th 6 to 7pm

Understory Paintings by Geraldine Abdoo Beneath every forest canopy lies the understory — the quieter layer of undergrowth, moss, and root where the real work of growth and decay happens, mostly out of sight. It's this hidden register that gives Geraldine Abdoo's body of work its name. Raised outside Detroit in a household of makers — her father carved wooden decoys, her mother worked in ceramics — Abdoo learned early that art is something lived with, not set apart. Her paintings grow out of shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, using her iPhone as a visual sketchbook to gather colors, shapes, and patterns on walks through natural, suburban, and urban settings. Back in the studio, those observations become the starting point for abstraction: intuitive contours in Stabilo crayon on raw canvas, then layers of acrylic built into positive and negative shapes, guided by spontaneous brushstrokes and edited until each piece finds its own sense of movement and serenity. After years working in photography and visual storytelling, Abdoo returned to painting and found her truest artistic self again. Periods of personal challenge and caregiving deepened her need to create, and through series inspired by flowers and natural forms she explores love, loss, grief, remembrance, and resilience — serenity sitting alongside tension, calm alongside ache. “I'm not trying to paint a forest,” Abdoo says. “I'm trying to paint what's left in me after I've walked through one.” Understory invites viewers to slow down and look past the surface calm of these paintings — to find, in their layers of color and gesture, the quiet grounding and reflection Abdoo aims to translate onto canvas, and the remembrance woven beneath it. ABOUT THE ARTIST Geraldine Abdoo is a painter whose practice bridges photography, drawing, and abstraction, translating walks through forest, suburb, and city into layered, intuitive compositions. EXHIBITION DETAILS Artist: Geraldine Abdoo Exhibition: Understory Venue: Midland Park Memorial Library, 250 Godwin Avenue, Midland Park, NJ 07432 Dates: October 5th - December 28th Opening reception: October 5th 6pm-7pm Contact: Geraldine Abdoo, geri.abdoo@gmail.com

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Understory
Paintings by Geraldine Abdoo
Beneath every forest canopy lies the understory — the quieter layer of undergrowth, moss, and root where the real work of growth and decay happens, mostly out of sight. It's this hidden register that gives Geraldine Abdoo's body of work its name.

Raised outside Detroit in a household of makers — her father carved wooden decoys, her mother worked in ceramics — Abdoo learned early that art is something lived with, not set apart. Her paintings grow out of shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, using her iPhone as a visual sketchbook to gather colors, shapes, and patterns on walks through natural, suburban, and urban settings. Back in the studio, those observations become the starting point for abstraction: intuitive contours in Stabilo crayon on raw canvas, then layers of acrylic built into positive and negative shapes, guided by spontaneous brushstrokes and edited until each piece finds its own sense of movement and serenity.

After years working in photography and visual storytelling, Abdoo returned to painting and found her truest artistic self again. Periods of personal challenge and caregiving deepened her need to create, and through series inspired by flowers and natural forms she explores love, loss, grief, remembrance, and resilience — serenity sitting alongside tension, calm alongside ache.

“I'm not trying to paint a forest,” Abdoo says. “I'm trying to paint what's left in me after I've walked through one.”
Understory invites viewers to slow down and look past the surface calm of these paintings — to find, in their layers of color and gesture, the quiet grounding and reflection Abdoo aims to translate onto canvas, and the remembrance woven beneath it.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Geraldine Abdoo is a painter whose practice bridges photography, drawing, and abstraction, translating walks through forest, suburb, and city into layered, intuitive compositions.

EXHIBITION DETAILS
Artist: Geraldine Abdoo
Exhibition: Understory
Venue: Midland Park Memorial Library, 250 Godwin Avenue, Midland Park, NJ 07432
Dates: October 5th - December 28th
Opening reception: October 5th 6pm-7pm
Contact: Geraldine Abdoo, geri.abdoo@gmail.com

250 Godwin Avenue, Midland Park, NJ 07432

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