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WOODY GWYN AMERICAN VISTA

Woody Gwyn American Vista

July 29 - September 5.2016

LewAllenGalleries 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com cover: Arbolito, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 24 x 24 in

Woody Gwyn American Vista Woody Gwyn paints the American landscape in search of finding and expressing what he calls its “truth.” For him, the “truth” of a place extends beyond faithful depiction of precise detail and requires in addition an artist’s individual and candid interpretation in the way those details are expressed in a painting. This passion for what might be called finding the character of the land is what gives Gwyn’s work its unique quality of beauty and its significant gravity and intelligence. This quest confers on his paintings unmistakable identity and qualifies him as a singular figure in American art of today. He is considered among the finest contemporary representational painters of our time. As with this exhibition at LewAllen Galleries of recent work entitled American Vista, Gwyn works mainly using egg tempera on canvas or panel, a medium that permits him to capture exquisite and minute detail. He paints exactingly from close study of his subject, whether shimmering sea coast, highway vista, arboreal image, starry sky or Southwestern mesa and arroyo, to name but a few examples of his varied subjects. His work usually begins, in Gwyn’s words, “out in the field” with plein air sketches and watercolors as direct and immediate record of his observations and impressions on site. But a substantial part of the artist’s genius involves a remarkable ability to add or subtract elements and arrange their composition in ways that authentically reflect not only what he sees but what he feels about a place. Gwyn has said about his art that it is a way of “sensing reality from the inside out” which enables a depth of intuitive expression that he likens to the mystical. In recognizing the power of aesthetics to have transformative effect, Gwyn makes art that unremittingly registers the impact of his personal responses to the places and things that move him. He is unburdened by the impetus in much of contemporary art to disclaim the legitimacy of beauty in favor of banality masquerading as the avant-garde. For Gwyn, truth is paramount and beauty is the ultimate truth. The facture of Gwyn’s paintings create a visual paradox that is central to the uniqueness and excellence of the work. This paradox lies in Gwyn’s ability to extract a sense of the extraordinary that resides hidden even in the ordinary. Shunning embellishment, Gwyn is resolute in finding beauty “in the way things are.” Through a masterful combination of fastidious observation and intuition, exquisite technical skill in rendering minute and often tedious detail, and a truly uncanny facility with suffusing pristine light into his work, Gwyn paints the unadorned reality of a subject but, in the process, radiates its inherent luster. It is this singular dreamlike aura that Gwyn captures so skillfully in his work and that elevates even the quotidian to visual majesty. Part of Gwyn’s process involves an ability to pluck from the vast universe of possible subjects often diurnal scenes

that at his hand become images of brilliance. His technique often involves unexpected—even quirky— perspective, and it insists on the inclusion of excruciating amounts of detail he observes in the subjects he chooses—thousands of minutely-painted wave crests in ocean scenes, hundreds of tiny stones in road cut paintings, hundreds of points of starlight in nocturnal skies, countless leaves and blossoms on trees, incalculable blades of grass in fields. Even the most unlikely subjects for most landscape painters—a rusty guardrail, a stretch of highway tarmac, a simple apple tree, a road tunnel, a patch of water, a snippet of parched desert or a rocky slope—contain such enormous arrays of visual content exquisitely rendered by Gwyn that even the un-majestic appears glorious. With his choices of often commonplace subjects and settings that he imbues with purifying light, Gwyn’s paintings echo classic aspects of the American character. There is a kind of visual populism in the powerful ennoblement Gwyn transfigures in his depiction of the everyday. He captures his scenes without embellishment and privileges their simplicity with crystalline light to reveal the virtue and beauty present in the straight-forward reality of things. Like the mythic American hero, Gwyn’s paintings attain their power from the absence of pretense, essential humility, honest strength, and purity of spirit. Gwyn notes that “Reality is an inexhaustible source” and his work consistently demonstrates that what is is itself worthy of admiration. Gwyn paints what strikes him as worthwhile, devoid of much premeditation or influence from conventional notions of subjects more commonly associated with landscape painting. He says, “I see something and just know. It is all based, I think, on intuition.” Such is the case with the image of a gravelly highway shoulder that curves between road and ocean in “Pacific Curve.” A guardrail provides unconventional division of the picture plane between the diametric realms of the natural and the man-made, a contrast often engaged by Gwyn’s imagery. In this work, a consummate symbol of the natural—an expanse of blue water—converges with the archetypally manmade—gray concrete of a highway. Rust spots on the railing that separates them, myriad stones covering the shoulder, tire marks on the road, and crests on the water all attest to Gwyn’s phenomenal facility for excruciating levels of verisimilitude. But lengthier study of the painting reveals more. The two realms, as Gwyn depicts them, transcend their individual identity in this painting and, washed in Gwyn’s radiant light, combine to become a unified image of profound beauty. The painting is emblematic of how his work conveys and responds to the essential aesthetic heart present in even the most mundane of forms within the land. It is a testament to the rich rewards that flow from looking at the world closely and being present in it. What might be regarded as a less surprising object of the beau ideal—a stand of blooming apple trees—forms the subject of one of Gwyn’s most enthrallingly sumptuous paintings, “Arroyo Hondo Apple Orchard.” With a profusion of

vibrant white blossoms lavishly arrayed along arbors of intertwined branches, the painting enthuses an exuberant sense of pristine new beginnings and an obvious vision of nature’s aesthetic perfection. Every one of the thousands of blooms is painstakingly painted by Gwyn as though the laboriousness of its creation is the sacrificial offering extracted by this masterpiece in order to unfurl its breathtaking beauty.

Notably, most of Gwyn’s images, whether elysian or mundane, are devoid of human presence. They attain a serenity that, even if momentarily, displaces the peripatetic pace of everyday life with a sense of calm and the timeless. They exude a feeling of inexhaustible infinity. Amplified by the glowing luminosity that seems to emanate from within the surfaces of his paintings, the absence of activity activates the imagination and invites meditative reflection. In “Arbolito,” for example, a single blooming tree sits statuesquely before a piñon-covered hill and the scene exudes tranquility. There is an arresting stillness here in which time seems frozen, thought is slowed, and feelings are allowed to catch up. Similarly, Gwyn’s seascapes emanate a sense of the infinite that pervades much of the artist’s reverence for the world beyond man’s presence. The ocean flows endlessly and Gwyn’s response to this boundless realm are paintings that liberate perception from constraints of time and space. Water is the quintessential purifier and it ebbs and flows with the essence of the spiritual. Works like “Reflection” wash away thoughts of the material so that pure feeling can linger in consciousness between this world and another. The clouds that float above the calm sea in “Nube y Mar” hover in ethereal liminality, bridging the temporal with the eternal. The moonbeam that shimmers like a stream of enchanted light across the sea in “Pacific Nocturne” beckons the eye to a burst of light at the painting’s top conjuring thoughts of the spiritual. In another way, Gwyn engages the notion of the corporeal merging into the ephemeral through his paintings of mirage. In “Mirage II,” for example, Gwyn literally dematerializes the concrete, dissolving a stretch of highway into airy space of a distant horizon. Is this how the highway to heaven looks? Certainly it is representative of the adventuresome willingness of Gwyn to redefine our conception of landscape by suggesting both its objective and subjective substantiality. These works, as with so many others by this extraordinary interpreter of the poetic possibilities of landscape, transcend mere description and carry us into the realm of meditative imagining. Gwyn’s paintings seem always to fulfill the life quest he seeks for himself: “to make some meaning out of the world; I find that a very moving and exciting thing to do with a person’s life.” Indeed it is: for him and for us. – Kenneth R. Marvel 4

Pacific Nocturne, 2016, Egg tempera on paper, 29 x 20 1/2 in 5

Arroyo Hondo Apple Orchard, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 36 x 72 in 7

Pacific Curve, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 40 x 30 in 8

Talavera, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 13 x 15 in 9

Cross Current, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 6 5/8 x 24 in 11

Mirage II, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 4 1/8 x 8 7/8 in 12

Nube y Mar, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 8 x 12 in 13

Roswell: Windbreak, 2016, Mixed media on paper, 4 x 12 in 15

Cerrillos I, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 2 x 2 7/8 in 16

Cerrillos II, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 2 x 4 5/8 in 17

Niebla y Puente, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 12 x 12 in 18

Horizon, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 4 7/8 x 3 1/4 in 19

Solstice, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 8 x 10 in 20

Reflection, 2016, Egg tempera on paper, 11 1/2 x 9 in 21

The Saddle, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 7 1/2 x 15 1/2 in

Ortiz, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 4 1/2 x 4 1/2 in 23

Woody Gwyn

(b. 1944: San Antonio, Texas)

EDUCATION Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

1986 1983 1982 1981 1980 1978 1977 1965

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2016 American Vista, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2015 Solitary Places, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2014 Recent Landscapes, David Findlay Jr. Fine Art, New York, NY; also Woody Gwyn, 2010, Recent Work, 2006, and Woody Gwyn, 2005 2013 Santa Fe’s Holy Trinity of Landscape Painting, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2012 Elements of Landscape, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Woody Gwyn: American Landscapes, George Washington University, Luther Brady Gallery, Washington, DC 2009 Recent Paintings, Modernism, San Francisco, CA; also Fog Light and Space, 2006; Woody Gwyn, 1986, and Woody Gwyn, 1984 Woody Gwyn, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; also Between Earth and Sky, 2007, Woody Gwyn: In Human Terms, 2004, Woody Gwyn, 2003, Woody Gwyn: Solitary Places, 2002, and Recent Work, 1988 2005 Woody Gwyn Revisited, Museum of the Southwest, Midland, TX 2000 Woody Gwyn, MB Modern, New York, NY 1998 Woody Gwyn: Artist of the Year, Assembly of the Arts, Midland, TX 1997 Woody Gwyn, Cline-LewAllen Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 1996 Woody Gwyn, Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York, NY; also Woody Gwyn, 1994, New Paintings and Monotypes, 1992, Woody Gwyn, 1991, and The Edges of the Land, 1989 1995 Woody Gwyn, Horwitch-LewAllen Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 1987 Woody Gwyn, Foxley-Leach Gallery, Washington, DC 1986 Woody Gwyn, Modernism Gallery, San Francisco, CA

New Works by Woody Gwyn (Travelling Exhibition): Museum of the Southwest, Midland, TX McAllen International Museum, McAllen, TX The Art Center of Waco, Waco, TX The Museum at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX The Amarillo Art Center, Amarillo, TX Woody Gwyn, Davis-McClain Galleries, Houston, TX Woody Gwyn, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY Woody Gwyn, Heydt/Bair Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Woody Gwyn, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY Woody Gwyn, Elaine Horwitch Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Woody Gwyn, Meredith Long & Co., Houston, TX; also 1975, 1974,1973,1972, 1971, 1970, 1969, 1968, 1965 Woody Gwyn, Canyon Art Gallery, Canyon TX

SELECTED GRANTS AND AWARDS 2010 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts 1979 National Endowment of the Arts Grant SELECTED COLLECTIONS Albuquerque Museum of Art, Albuquerque, NM The Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York, NY Harvard University, Boston, MA McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM Museum of the Southwest, Midland, TX Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY Reading Public Museum & Art Gallery, Reading, PA 24

Niebla, 2016, Egg tempera on panel, 21 x 11 3/4 in 25

1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com ÂŠ 2016 LewAllen Contemporary LLC 26 Artwork ÂŠ Woody Gwyn