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American Realists at Harrison Gallery
10.10.08
(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.) -- The Harrison Gallery will present a show of five realist artists – Hale Johnson, John MacDonald, Nick Patten, Evan Wilson and Kim Denise – from December 6 through December 24. The artists will attend the opening reception at the Harrison Gallery on Saturday, December 6, from 5 to 7 pm.
Artists in the realist tradition paint honestly what they see – with no embellishments or interpretation -- yet their paintings can stir the emotions as surely as the works of impressionists, expressionists, abstractionists or any other school of painting.
Hale Johnson’s weathered barns perched on vast horizons evoke a feeling of quiet abandonment. The skies above the old farm buildings are dark and threatening, looking ready to explode into violent storm. And this juxtaposition of elements –the vulnerable, ephemeral, man-made structures against a backdrop of raw, eternal nature – gives Johnson’s work its awesome power. Johnson is drawn to the architecture and craftsmanship he finds in old farm buildings even as they age and deteriorate. He admires the shapes of barns, their proportions and how they relate to other buildings and to the land. His textures -- aging wood, rough foundation stones and smooth gray slates of the roofs – are painted in exquisite detail. Johnson, whose work is often compared with Andrew Wyeth’s and Eric Sloane’s, has forty year’s experience as a freelance artist, fifty-five solo shows to his credit and is included in public and private collections all around the world. Johnson, who lives in Colrain, Massachusetts, attended Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Newark School of Fine Art.
John MacDonald, a fourteen-year resident of Williamstown, Massachusetts, paints the rivers, woods, meadows and mountains of the Berkshires with the sure eye of someone who understands his subject and paints it head on with no romantic flourishes or sentimentality. His paintings are authentic images of landscapes the way they really look. MacDonald finds the uniqueness in each scene not only in the subject itself but in the light and color that reveal the subject. “My paintings are not symbolic of anything,” he says. “If they convey some sense of how I explored the visual elements of a scene at a specific moment, then I consider the painting successful.” MacDonald graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a BFA and from Purdue University with an MA degree in drawing and painting. Beside his career in fine art, MacDonald is a master of digital woodcuts and a successful graphic arts illustrator.
Nick Patten finds his subjects indoors in the rooms of older houses. He works from photographs to develop haunting compositions that include highly reflective surfaces and dramatic lighting with high contrasts of light and dark. His images can be serene, sad or mysterious depending on the interpretation of the viewer. “I don’t put narrative into my work,” says Patten, “and I don’t try to manipulate the viewer’s emotions. If someone feels melancholy looking at my work, fine, and if they feel nostalgia for a home once lived in, that’s just as valid.” Patten is a master at creating spaces that speak not through people or movements but through shadow, light and reflection. He earned his BA of Fine Arts at the College of St. Rose in Albany and studied life drawing at both the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design in New York City. Patten moved to a small town near Hudson, New York, after residing for many years on Cape Cod.
Evan Wilson’s accomplished paintings imbue everyday subjects with a heightened sense of elegance and grace. His dazzling still lifes, engaging portraits, genteel interiors and vibrant genre paintings show the enduring power of realism in the hands of a well-schooled and skillful artist. Wilson, who always paints from life with natural light, honed his talents with four years of study in Florence, Italy, where he learned from American and Italian artists. He had his first solo show at the Il Punto Gallery on the banks of the Arno River. In Europe he “discovered” John Singer Sargent, adopted his techniques and philosophy of art and has been working in the realist tradition ever since. Wilson equates realist painting to playing classical music. Both are learned skills, he says, and when an artist masters the technique he can then focus on the power of the image rather than the method of painting it. In 1994 Wilson moved to Hoosick, New York, a crossroads town in the Taconic Mountains just west of Bennington, Vermont.
Kim Denise uses pastels to create still life images of glassware, plates, fruit and napkins that are rich in color and luminosity, finely detailed and masterful at catching reflections. Her eye for painting distortions through glass is uncannily accurate. The image of a water glass in a Denise painting tempts the viewer to tap the rim with a fingernail to hear it chime. Her freshly sliced onions nearly bring tears to the eye and that fabric that cradles an apple begs to be touched. Where many still life painters choose elegant subjects –fine glass, bone china, sterling silver – Denise, a self-taught artist, paints everyday articles she finds in her own kitchen. “No object is ordinary,” she says, “if you look at it carefully enough and find the right light”. I’ve been known to photograph my dish drainer every day for a week trying to get the right light.” Until last July, Denise lived in Pownal, Vermont, but has since moved to Monroe, Louisiana, where she works in management at a home improvement company.
The Harrison Gallery is located at 39 Spring Street in Williamstown, MA. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10:00 am – 5:30 pm and Sunday from 11:00 am – 4:00 pm. For further information contact the Harrison Gallery at 413 458 1700 or visit the website at www.theharrisongallery.com.
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