A New Year and New Exhibitions at Gail Severn Gallery
Linda Christensen
Dialogues
Thru January 30th 2015
Linda Christensen’s latest work continues to explore the figure. Her compositions create challenges and obstacles which she creates solutions to familiar situations.
Honesty about herself is a crucial factor in Christensen’s paintings. Her overall desire is to emit emotion through the paint, the line, the contrasts and composition. Christensen keep things interesting and with a hint of danger. Danger in the desire to obscure what is already there and what might be a beautiful passage in the painting. Courage to continue growing and recognizing her need for emotional movement is paramount.
Theodore Waddell
Tucker's Seasonal Words of Wisdom
Thru January 30th 2015
"Tucker's Seasonal Words of Wisdom" is Theodore Waddell’s newest book for children and dog lovers of all ages. The second of Waddell’s children’s books, "Tucker's Seasonal Words of Wisdom" follows Tucker the Bernese Mountain Dog and his fellow ‘Berners’—and human pals—through a year of fun and exploration in the Northern Rockies. The happy ‘Berners’ experience the joys of each season, all the while sharing their uplifting brand of canine wisdom. Waddell’s beautifully painted works of oil on paper adorn each page of the book.
Gail Severn Gallery is pleased to be able to offer the original works on paper that are the images on the pages of this wonderful new book. Ted’s originals offer a playful sense of fun and fantasy with the ever present allure of Waddell’s master works. The works on paper delight both children and adults alike.
Theodore Waddell is an internationally recognized artist that has spent more than 50 years painting and sculpting his beloved western landscape. His work, full of horses, cattle and sheep are given life by his impasto style of painting using washes, endless colors and wax. The paper pieces in the exhibition show off his sense of humor and his amazing talents as an artist in all mediums.
Morgan Brig • Betsy Eby • Raphaëlle Goethals • Michael Gregory • Margaret Keelan • Laura McPhee • Marcia Myers • Melinda Tidwell
Thru January 30th, 2015
Inspired by the mysteries of life, Morgan Brig’s mixed media along with her copper and enamel works are both playful and contemplative. Her three dimensional wall sculptures are typically conceived in words by the writings in her journal. There, she explores human nature and the inner dialogue of individual character. Brig then expresses these ideas through symbols, icons, and even written text embedded onto her surfaces.
Using Pigmented oil paint, knives, blowtorches, and waxes Betsy Eby formulates herself, she creates encaustic paintings as rhythmic compositions. The artist says her best work results on the days she also dictates time to playing classical piano.
Focusing on painting as a space of exploration, Raphaëlle Goethals has used wax and resin as her signature medium for more than fifteen years. Probing the physicality of the materials, Goethals works in a process of layering, pouring, scraping off, scratching into the surface, effacing, leaving traces of earlier information, all of this eliciting from the viewer a continuous shifting in the perception of forms, a build up and overlap of successive stages which demands that his or hers attention continually adjusts. The physical history of the piece, however, is buried underneath the smooth surface, its presence felt rather than seen.
Nationally recognized painter Michael Gregory continues to create the richly detailed oil landscapes that he is so famous for. Collectors and Museums are inspired by the romantic and intellectual paintings that are realistic in style, but painted from Gregory’s imagination and travels to specific locations. Reconstructed landscapes that bring to mind special places and times in ones memory.
Margaret Keelan’s ceramic sculptures of dolls / children and animals are both compelling and disconcerting. There is an immediate and visceral reaction to the heavily textured surfaces. The figures appear to have been excavated. The layers of stains and glazes curl and peel away, creating the illusion of disintegrating paint over weathered wood. Her meticulous approach to creating these aged surfaces gives the sculptures a strength and integrity, suggesting they have undergone their own rites of passage through heat and flame.
Photographer Laura McPhee, noted for her stunning large-scale landscapes and portraits of the people who live and work in them, has been traveling to eastern India for over a decade. There she has devoted her perceptive vision to picturing layers of history, culture, religion, and class as they appear in private heritage homes and public markets, in lively street festivals, and in the faces of city dwellers in Calcutta (also known as Kolkata).
Signed copies of McPhee’s latest book published in conjunction with Yale University Press The Home and the World: A View of Calcutta, is available for purchase during the preview exhibition.
When Marcia Myers was first exposed to the ancient Roman mural paintings of the 1st century CE, she saw pure abstraction. It was these frescos, and those of the Renaissance masters, that compelled Myers to transform this ancient technique into modern terms.
Myers utilized the formal elements of artistic expression—color, light, texture, shape, and space—to capture the essence of an experience. Her paintings are relics of a creative process where the act of creating supersedes the product of creation.
This preview exhibition features a small selection of work that will be in the Summer 2015 exhibition. The Fresco paintings will be the final release of paintings from the Marcia Myers estate.
Melinda Tidwell's collage works begin with the formal aspects of design and a fascination with the balance of visual elements in composition. Using simple geometric shapes and rectilinear alignments, she focuses on the coherence and juxtaposition of color, pattern, placement and size. With a background in mathematics, computer graphics, and design and her predilection for the geometric, this rational foundation serves as the basis for her departure into what is not rational. The way colors activate each other, how the size and position muddle or enhance visual unity, the simple grace of worn and tattered surfaces. The picture plane becomes a dialogue of vibrant, abstract voices unified by a logic one can feel but not fully understand. Tidwell finds this wonderfully mysterious and enlivening.
Using discarded books as her primary material adds both seriousness and levity to her work. Tidwell likes working with words, pieces of text, the odd string of numbers. Cut away from their original context, they operate as texture and shape and also as a kind of code, or pieces of memory. The abstraction of this information into bits of non-sense, hope to tease the mind into the wilder lands of free association and one’s own imagination. The peculiar sensation of a world slightly askew gives her no end of delight.
