 E-announcement from Gross McCleaf Gallery / January 22, 2013
Image: Thomas Paquette, Field Day, Adirondacks, Oil on linen, 16 x 24 inches. Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to announce Souvenir, a solo exhibition of landscape paintings by Western Pennsylvania painter, Thomas Paquette. This is the artist's third solo exhibition with Gross McCleaf Gallery. The show will run from January 29 to February 23, 2013. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Friday, February 1, 5 - 7 pm. Paquette's unmistakably 21st century landscape paintings owe much of their spirit to many Modernist and more recent influences, but can also be traced back to the 19th century American Luminist and Tonalist painters such as George Inness, Frederic Church, Thomas Moran, and James McNeil Whistler. Paquette's paintings also share an affinity with the New Hope Impressionists in that his work is involved with capturing the way light fills and defines the landscape around us. However, while Paquette typically may begin his smaller paintings in the field, even they are usually reworked in the studio - a departure from the Impressionist dedication to painting en plein air. The artist combines direct observation, reinvention, and memory, often enhanced by the assistance of photography. He says of his process, "... I rarely work on site anymore as it has become so counterproductive. Even the gouaches begun on site are usually completed after some revamping in the studio. Temperamentally I am not a plein air painter. My works develop over long periods of time, especially the larger ones which typically take months. So photography has been a useful tool for bringing the subject back before my eyes. I started by using black and white photographs I've shot, so that I would be forced to invent the color through memory. Later, when I felt unfazed by the lure of camera color, I used slides - typically never seen projected - as tiny luminous flashbacks to the subject matter I was trying to evoke. I could go back there instantly by holding the slide up to the window for a few seconds, and would do this infrequently, only when I was stuck or needed to find a new element to introduce to a composition. Observing the elements of a photograph, like observing the elements of nature, can provide new insight to improving a composition, while still remaining true to the subject." Allowing himself to experiment with color, Paquette sometimes covers the canvas with arbitrary paint to give himself something to "work against", courting the possibility of failure or discovery as opposed to predictable outcomes. Thomas Paquette received his MFA from Southern Illinois University and his BFA from Bemidji State University. His work has been featured in more than fifty solo exhibitions in prominent galleries and museums including shows in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Washington DC, and Maine. Paquette's paintings have also been selected to hang in sixteen U.S. embassies on five continents. Gross McCleaf Gallery |
