The State of the Art Gallery will present The More You Look, The More You See, featuring nine members of the Gallery January 6 – 30, 2022. There will be an opening reception January 7, 5:00-8:00 pm.
Snow on Forsythia
oil on canvas
24″ x 18″
$700
I am showing a collection of paintings from far ranging locations and time periods. Some are paintings I have never before shown which have been waiting for just the right combination of companion pieces. These semi-abstracted landscapes reveal the patterns of nature – horizontal bands of earth, air, and water, the jumbled chaos of bush and vine, the random patterns of rippled water and mowed pasture.
Slea Head, Dingle, Ireland
oil on canvas
24″ x 16″
$650
Slea Head is a painting that I started long ago in 2001, after a three week painting trip to Dingle, on the west coast of Ireland. Slea Head is one of the many headlands in that rocky coast. A patchwork of sloping sheep meadows juts out above the Atlantic Ocean and ends in a steep cliff. I went to Slea Head on a day of cold mist and drizzle, bundled in warm fleece, sturdy raincoat and rain-pants. I drew with my sketch book protected inside a large clear plastic bag. When I returned to Ithaca, I started the painting in my studio. It remained hanging there, unfinished, because I thought it was lacking something. Two decades later, I could finally see – it needed less, not more, and I removed a strip of land, essentially bringing the viewer closer to the brink of the cliff, to look down on the beach below.
Unspoiled is one of a pair of paintings that I made in response to an ugly disaster. On April 20, 2010, the oil
Unspoiled
oil on canvas
24″x 18″
$700
drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, operating in the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded and sank resulting in the death of 11 workers on the rig and the largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations. For weeks volunteers worked tirelessly washing oil off of shore birds, saving as many as they could. This was the painting that showed the pristine beach before the spill and its companion showed the water and beach despoiled and littered with oil covered dead birds. At that time, only the second painting got into the show in the gallery, while this one stayed in the studio, biding its time, waiting for its turn to celebrate the beauty of nature unspoiled.
Wolf Island Hay Field
oil on canvas
24″ x 16″
$650
Wolf Island Hayfield was inspired by a painting trip to the St. Lawrence . Wolf Island is in the middle of that river, between Kingston, Ontario to the north and Cape Vincent, New York to the south. it makes a lovely day trip via ferry when visiting that area. It is mostly rural in character, with a larger town in the north where one can catch another ferry to Kingston. Why did it languish in the stacks for so many years? It was ahead of its time as one of my first experiments in abstracting the landscape, and needed some time for later paintings to catch the new style in order to make a collection. So, here it is stepping out onto the stage for the first time
The Resevoir, and Morning Perceptions round out the group of six paintings that I chose for this show.
Morning Perceptions #1, West Hill
oil on canvas
14″ x 18″
$550
The Resevoir
oil on canvas
18″x18″
$700
