Larry Preston: Recent Paintings
William Baczek Fine Arts, in Northampton, Massachusetts is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new oil paintings by Larry Preston. The exhibition will be on display from Wednesday, May 1 through Saturday, June 8, 2019. The public is invited to an opening reception with the artist on Saturday, May 4 from 5 to 7 pm.
Larry Preston has been exhibiting with William Baczek Fine Arts since the gallery opened in 1996 and has had numerous solo exhibitions at the gallery. This exhibition will include more than twenty recent still life oil paintings. “The term contemporary still life is almost an oxymoron, but Larry Preston’s work successfully breathes new life into the tradition,” says gallery owner William Baczek.
Larry Preston had a twenty-five year professional musical career before focusing on painting, what he calls his “first love”. He constantly challenges himself with reflective surfaces, subtle lighting, and subjects with textures as varied as lemon peels and aged lace. Preston’s work has been featured repeatedly in American Art Collector, which stated that he, “… rivals the Flemish Old Masters he studied as a youth.” But unlike most still life painters who use the Dutch artists as their inspiration, Larry Preston’s paintings are not ponderous or weighted by history. They are serious paintings that do not take themselves too seriously.
As Preston sees it, “I paint what I find beautiful. I do not paint to be relevant, for an audience or to make any statement other than to capture the beauty to be found in the objects I choose to paint …. I find that, in this modern world, there is too little observance of the beauty in our surroundings. I think that is the real importance in our lives.” That is why his paintings explore subjects as varied as eggs from his own chickens, amaryllis flowers, knobby wild apples, and stacks of jelly donuts. His paintings have a richness of color that is the result of many applications of thin colored glazes on smooth prepared wooden panels.