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.
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.
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. 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 collections all around the world. Johnson, who lives in Colrain, MA, attended Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and studied at the Newark School of Fine Art.
John MacDonald, a fourteen-year resident of Williamstown, MA, paints the lanscapes of the Berkshires with the sure eye of someone who understands his subject and paints it with no romantic flourishes or sentimentality. His paintings are authentic images of landscapes the way they really look. “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. 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.
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.
The Harrison Gallery is located at 39 Spring Street in Williamstown, MA. Gallery hours are Mon-Sat, 10 am ą to 5:30 pm and Sunday from 11 am to 4 pm. The Harrison Gallery is at 413-458-1700 or on the web at www.theharrisongallery.com.