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Posts Tagged ‘Fenimore Art Museum’

The Waking Moment

Posted in Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , , on November 9, 2012| 3 Comments »

Normally at this time of the year I am in a winding down sort of mode, easing back from my easel and painting table to take a deep breath.  It is normally when I reassess the year and begin to put together a new direction in which  I might push the work.  But this has been an unusual year and I find myself busier than ever.  My show, Inward Bound,  at the Kada Gallery runs until December 6 and my exhibition at the Fenimore Art Museum, Internal Landscapes,  hangs until December 31.  That would be a full schedule in itself but this year offers yet another opportunity, one that fills my schedule to the brink and has kept me fully engaged in the studio as of late.  I am talking about a solo show of my work, The Waking Moment,  that will be opening December 1 at the Just Looking Gallery in San Luis Obispo in California.

Owner Ralph Gorton and Gallery Director Ken McGavin  first contacted me earlier this year and began showing my work  at the gallery, which opened in 1984, in April.  They have done a fabulous job highlighting my work and it has done very well in their gallery, to the point where we agreed that a show was in order.

I wasn’t sure about it at first.  I was fairly new to their market  and I was also thinking that I wouldn’t be able to build a show for them.  But they have introduced me thoroughly to their  clients and the pace of this year in the studio has had me immersed in a deep groove which made it possible for me to work at a high level without much of a period of buildup.  As a result, I find myself  pretty excited about the work I am producing at this time , which includes the piece shown above, The Prospering Light, a 16″ by 26″ painting on paper.

I am nearly finished with the last few pieces for the show which will soon be on their way to the California coast.  Then I will step back for a moment or two.  At least,  I think I will.  This rhythm I have in the studio at this time feels so right that I am a little hesitant to step away for more than a moment, knowing how difficult it can be to recapture that feeling.  But for now, I am riding this wave in the studio and am excited by each new rush that comes in the work.  I will be showing more of this new work in the coming weeks as the Just Looking Gallery show approaches.

 

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Food For Thought

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged , , on November 8, 2012| 8 Comments »

I had a good time  yesterday at a Food For Thought lecture at the Fenimore Art Museum where I was the speaker.   We first had a lovely luncheon in the museum’s Study Center, surrounded by cabinets full of artifacts from the fabulous Thaw Collection of American Indian Art, one of the prized collections of the museum and arguably the finest collection of  Native American art in the world.  I spoke briefly after the luncheon in the Study Center, filling in some biographical details, before we moved the talk up to the gallery  containing the show, where I continued the talk and fielded questions.

All in all, it went pretty well.  The attendees were wonderful and attentive, making me feel very welcome, and their questions and comments were insightful.  As always in the aftermath, I felt that I had omitted  crucial details. But I have come to the understanding that if I were to try to tell all the anecdotes and pass on all of the information about my work that  I’ve amassed over the years that these talks would never end.  I know that I wouldn’t like that and I can’t imagine anyone else who would.  That being said, I thought that yesterday’s talk went just about right  and I left feeling that most everyone found something enjoyable or informative in some part of the talk.  I sure hope so.

I have to extend some huge thanks here to a group of folks who made extraordinary efforts to come to the talk and to who I don’t think I can ever fully express my gratitude.  They all were owners of my paintings who had one ( or two, in one case) that were part of the show and had accepted my invitation to attend the event so that they might see their paintings in the lovely setting that the Fenimore affords.  All came from considerable distances and took valuable time from their lives to make the journey.   I would like to deeply thank Gary Tanigawa who traveled up from the Alexandria, VA area,  Dominique and Vince Haibach from Erie, PA and Loni Kula and her friend Mary Helen Olmstead  from the Corning area.  I am humbled and moved by your willingness to participate yesterday and can’t say “Thank You” enough.  I can only hope that you  found it worth the effort.

I must also thank  photographer Moira Law and friend ( whose name evades me this morning– I am so sorry!) who traveled down from Ottawa for the talk.  We have corresponded briefly over the last few years and it was wonderful to finally meet her and to talk for a bit.  Thank you so much for taking the time, Moira, and thanks to everyone who made time to attend  yesterday.  It was most appreciated.

And finally, thank you to Paul D’Ambrosio and the great staff  at the Fenimore Art Museum– Michelle Murdock, Maria Vann, Sue deBruijn and Kajsa Sabatke, among others–  for the wonderful experience.  They are true pros and have made  this whole thing feel very special for me, something I will always remember with great warmth.  Thank you so much allowing me the chance to experience this.

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Food For Thought Lecture

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on October 13, 2012| 4 Comments »

This is the grand staircase that joins the newer addition that houses the spectacular Thaw Collection of American Indian Art to the original building of the Fenimore Art Museum in lovely Cooperstown .   I am honored to have an exhibit of my work, Internal Landscape: The Paintings of GC Myers,  hanging in this wonderful facility. It has went better than I had hoped thus far.  The response has been extremely positive  according to  the museum staff and  I have been contacted by many people who had not known of my work.  The show continues to hang there until the end of the year, December 31.

A reminder here that next month I will be giving a talk at the museum as part of their Food For Thought lecture series.  The event consists of a luncheon followed by the talk.  There is a fee for this event.  My talk there is on Wednesday, November 7, beginning at 12:30 PM and running until around 2:30.   If you’re interested in finding out a bit more about how the work came about and evolved over the years, this is a good opportunity to do so in a beautiful and comfortable setting.  Hope to see you there!

You can get more info by clicking here or by calling  the museum  at (607) 547-1461.

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Next Up– Inward Bound

Posted in Recent Paintings, tagged , , on September 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

It’s been a busy summer with two solo gallery exhibits in the rearview mirror and the show of my work which is currently hanging at the Fenimore Art Museum.  But there’s no time to put it on autopilot and cruise.  I have a busy fall schedule with two more solo shows upcoming, one in October at the Kada Gallery in Erie, PA and the other in early December at the Just Looking Gallery in San Luis Obispo, CA.  I am pretty excited about both of these shows and will provide details on the California show later.

But first up is the Kada Gallery show, one that I do every other year.  This Erie gallery is ran by Kathy and Joe DeAngelo, two of the most wonderful people  I have been lucky enough to stumble across in this business.  They  make you feel incredibly welcome the moment you walk in their gallery.  Kathy takes great interest in the artwork and tries to gather as much info about each painting that I bring, wanting to be able to provide potential collectors with any detail that they might desire.  From an artist’s standpoint, she’s a dream representative for my work– someone who connects with it and radiates an enthusiasm for it.

The show this year is titled Inward Bound and opens on Saturday, October 20  with an evening reception at the Erie gallery.  There will be a short gallery talk at the beginning of the reception.  I hope if you’re in the Erie region that night that you can stop in and say hello.  I think this will be a really good show.  The piece shown above is a smaller piece from this show, a 5″ by 8″ painting on paper, that is titled Hope on High.

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Summing Up/ Redux

Posted in Influences, tagged on September 20, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I am on the road today so I went into the archives and came across this post from two years ago.  I had just received an inquiry from the Fenimore Art Museum which eventually led to my exhibit which hangs there currently.  It’s always difficult to summarize yourself.  People at shows and talks ask quite often for a way to categorize  the body of my work, to give a few words which adequately describe it, and I am  always at a total loss for words.  It just is to me.  

Here are my thoughts from a couple of years ago on this subject:

I had an inquiry yesterday from a museum, asking for more photos and information on my work in order to give them a well-rounded sense of my work. So, I sat down and began going back through my work over the years, trying to determine how I might encapsulate what I do in a condensed manner that gives them a complete look and satisfies me.

I struggled with the task. Choosing work that sums me up was difficult. Can I sum up my work in one or two or twenty or a hundred images? How do you define yourself at what you yourself consider a midpoint?

For me, it all feels the same, as though it is part of a continuum. I see differences through the years but I know that each painting was done with pretty much the same mindset and the same critical eye during the process which makes them equal in my mind which gives them the consistency for their audience that I seek. Maybe it’s that word egalitarian coming up again, but I want there to be no difference in the quality and emotional impact between the smallest, most affordable painting and the largest, more expensive work.

And then there are the series I’ve done through the years. Obviously, the ubiquitous Red Tree. But there is also the Red Roofs. Red Chairs. Archaeology. And many other less organized, recurrent groups of work featuring sailboats, cityscapes and small, lone figures. Or the other figurative work featuring what I call the Outlaws or the early Exiles. How many of these pieces fall into the category of rounding out an overview of the work?

How do you completely sum up yourself in the most condensed way?

I had this come up a few years back in nother way. After a very nice, well written article in the local newspaper, I was contacted by the producers of a national talk show set in NYC on one of the major news networks. They had seen the article and the host felt I would be a perfect fit for the show which featured a panel of guests from various fields in a fast-paced, short sound bite-y format. The host would shoot out a question and go quickly to a guest who would have 15 or 20 seconds to give a full answer.

So, the producers interviewed me separartely then finished with about 20 minutes of the main producer pretending to be the host and throwing questions at me quickly. After we had been doing this for the 20 minutes, with her constantly urging me to be faster with my responses, I was pretty frustrated and finally asked her what she wanted from me.

She said she wanted to summarize what my career was about in 15 seconds.

That pretty much ended the interview and, needless to say, I didn’t go to NYC for the show. I was actually relieved but it made me wonder how someone could adequately sum up themselves in such a short manner. I still haven’t figured it out and I guess I’ll have to think about this some more.

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Thoughts on the Fenimore Show

Posted in Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , on September 4, 2012| 7 Comments »

Cheri and I made our way to Cooperstown this past Saturday to see my exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum.  Cheri  had not yet seen it and also wanted to see the American Impressionists show before it comes down on the 16th of September as well as the paintings of folk portraitist William Matthew Prior.  Both of those shows were wonderful, particularly the Prior exhibit which gave a broader view of his work and the world in which he painted.

But  we there to mainly take in my show there, of course.  It’s always a strange feeling going into a space filled with your work.   I remember the first time I had a solo show at the Principle Gallery back in 2000.  When we came into the gallery, the work that filled the space seemed to surround and overwhelm us.  Both Cheri and I felt a bit nauseous at first, as though it were just too much to absorb.  I still periodically get that little bit of  a tremble in the gut when confronted with a roomful of my work and I did feel it just a bit on Saturday.

But Cheri’s response to the work took away any tension I was feeling.  Her eyes opened very wide and her face glowed as she came to the top of the grand staircase and spotted the painting that was framed perfectly in the doorway to my exhibit.  We went into the space and she turned, taking in all the walls with a glance, a broad smile on her face.

“Amazing.  It’s perfect.”

That was all I needed to hear.  I was happy as I could possibly at that moment.  I have often kidded that she is often my harshest critic but that is simply the result of a directness and honesty that comes from 35 years of marriage.  I trust her opinion and her glowing approval set aside any apprehension that might have been lingering.  I began to take in the work without worry.

For me, it was most satisfying seeing the very large painting, The Internal Landscape, shown at the top center here.  I had never seen it hang on a wall, especially  with the beautiful lighting and atmosphere that this space offered.  It was all that I hoped it would be on the wall and my eyes kept coming back to it.  The rhythm of the piece really rang out in that space and seemed to connect with all of the other pieces that surrounded it.  The works there seemed to be alive on the walls and there is a really nice warmth and continuum running through this group of work that seems to envelop you when you enter the gallery.  That’s a nice feeling and I think it’s a great representation of  my work to this point.

It was also interesting to go back into the gallery after taking in the work of the Impressionist masters that took up the adjoining larger gallery space.  I initially was a bit afraid that my work would not fit well, would be overwhelmed by this work.   I mean, there is gorgeous work there from Mary Cassatt, Hassam , Glackens and Willard Metcalf— all painters that I have long admired.  It is a bit intimidating.  But coming back into my gallery, Cheri commented how well my work held up next to their’s and I realized that I didn’t feel as out of place with my work there as I thought I might.  In fact, I no longer felt intimidated in the least.

I hope that doesn’t sound egotistical.  It’s certainly not meant to be and I would never put myself up to the level of the  time-tested masters.  But leaving the museum that day, I felt as though I had fully shown that my work had its own truly  individual voice, one that had the same validity and integrity as the work of any painter.  That was a good feeling on a very good day.

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Redux: It Is What It Is

Posted in Influences, Video, tagged , , , on August 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

When I was speaking last week with the docents at the Fenimore Art Museum, I was confronted with a question that asked about the repetition of forms and themes of my paintings, particularly my use of the Red Tree.  I think I answered the question satisfactorily, stating that I tried to paint as far as possible from the conscious part of my mind . I pointed out that painting in series of repeated forms allowed me to put aside thoughts of composition and focus on the color and texture that carry the emotional weight of the painting.  The theme and focus of the painting was really just an invitation to the viewer to enter the picture and experience the underlying emotional content.  And that was where I hoped the viewer ultimately arrived .

But driving home, I thought about a  blogpost from a few years back that addressed the same question and my own concern early in my career with allowing myself to simply paint whatever came out of me.  I hope that  posting this piece from October of 2009 helps better answer that question from the Fenimore docents:

There was an episode of Mystery! on PBS starring Kenneth Branagh as Swedish detective Wallander. It was okay, nice production but nothing remarkable in the story but there was a part at the end that struck home with me and related very much to my life as a painter. Wallander’s father, played by the great character actor David Warner, was, like me, a landscape painter. Now aged and in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, his son comes to him and intimates that he can’t go on as a detective, that he can’t take the stress. The painter then recalls how when Wallander was a boy he would ask his father about his painting, asking, “Why are they always the same, Dad? Why don’t you do something different” 

He said he could never explain. Each morning when he began to paint, he would tell himself that maybe today he would do a seascape or a still life or maybe an abstract, just splash on the paint and see where it takes him. But then he would start and each day he would paint the same thing- a landscape. Whatever he did, that was what came out. He then said to his son, ” What you have is your painting- I may not like it, you may not like it but it’s yours.” 

That may not translate as well on paper without the atmospheric camera shots and the underscored music but for me it said a lot in how I think about my body of work. Like the father, I used to worry that I would have to do other things- still lifes, portraits, etc.- to prove my worth as a painter but at the end of each day I found myself looking at a landscape, most often with a red tree. As time has passed, I have shed away those worries. I don’t paint portraits. Don’t paint still life. I paint what comes out and most often it is the landscape. And that red tree that I once damned when I first realized it had became a part of who I am. 

I realized you have to stop damning who you are…

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Redstar

Posted in Early Paintings, Favorite Things, Influences, tagged , , on August 28, 2012| 1 Comment »

I wrote last week about a   painting, Babette’s Feast,  that was part of a small group of my early formative work on display at the Fenimore Art Museum.  Each of these pieces marked a new step forward in the development of my work that became more and more obvious as the years went by.  The painting shown here, Redstar, is another of this group.

It’s a tiny little piece, only around 2″ tall by 3″ wide but it spoke loudly to me.  It was painted in the format that characterized my early pre-Red Tree work, a larger block of color over a contrasting smaller block of color separated by a white line.  This line was actually just the paper showing through, not a painted line at all.  The distinction of this painting is in the larger block of color that made up the sky.

It was a random pattern of smaller blocks of color that gave the piece a different rhythm and feel that my earlier pieces in this format.  These curved lines that crisscrossed the sky gave it a  texture  that was distinctly different from the smooth, textureless  work I had been producing until this point.  This sparked something in my mind and set me on a path where I sought more and more ways to create texture within the picture.  I saw this texture as an enhancement to the colors of the work, something that gave the color the  added dimensions of depth and complexity-  perhaps the most important elements to the color in my work.

So, while it may be an easy piece to overlook due to it’s diminutive size , it appears  very large  for me.

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Babette’s Feast

Posted in At the Movies, Early Paintings, Influences, tagged , , on August 23, 2012| 5 Comments »

There is a  group of four small paintings that are part of my current exhibition at the Fenimore Art Museum.  They represent the very earliest pieces that showed the way for all of the work that followed, establishing a format and look that I had been seeking in vain up until the time that these pieces arrived.  This little painting is titled Babette’s Feast and is the first indicator of the Red Roof paintings that were to come in later years as well as one of the first pieces that featured a path that leads into the picture plane, a feature of many of my recent paintings.  It is also one of my wife’s treasured pieces.

The title, which was given to this painting by my wife after the title of  one of her favorite movies, a 1987 Danish film and Academy Award winner for best Foreign Film that is based on a story from Danish writer, Isak Dinesen,  best known for her autobiographical tale Out of Africa.  It is a wonderful tale set in a 19th century village in Denmark and, without getting into all of the details of the film, has great humor, beauty and humanity.    You can read a pretty good synopsis of the film on Wikipedia.

One of the docents at the museum asked me about the title and, knowing the film,  commented that it fit the piece perfectly.  That was a gratifying comment for me even though the painting was not done with any thought of the movie.  And even though I see different significance in this little painting, especially as a precursor for what was to come, it  is a great compliment to have a piece bring to mind a favorable comparison with such an evocative and stirring film.

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Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed

Posted in Folk Art, tagged , , , , , on August 22, 2012| 1 Comment »

William Matthew Prior Self Portrait

I spent several hours yesterday at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown giving a talk to the staff  and docents about my work and the paintings hanging in my current exhibit at the museum.  Many thanks to Maria Vann and the  staff  there for making me feel so welcome and for their many questions and comments.  They are a really impressive group of professionals who make the Fenimore a world-class facility and I was honored to be able to talk with them.

There was also news yesterday at the Fenimore about one of the other exhibits that is currently on display,  Artist & Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed.   This is the first  retrospective exhibit that focuses solely on William Matthew Prior, the great 19th century folk portraitist and features more than 40 examples of his work.  Yesterday, it was featured in a review in the Wall Street Journal written by Lee Rosenbaum.

It’s a great show that I encourage anybody within range to take in before it closes at the end of the year.  For a real in-depth peek Rosenbaum has also posted an interview with Fenimore president and CEO, Paul D’Ambrosio.  His insights into the works really bring them and Prior to life.

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