Water Paintings
Opening Reception Wednesday, November 13, 2024 from 5-8pm
The Local, 13-02 44th Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101
November 10th through December 9th, 2024
Open every day, all day / 347 738-5251 / www.thelocalny.com
My landscape work is thematically grouped around the twelve months, the four seasons and the universal elements of earth, air, fire, and water. During the last few years I have concentrated on land formations in many of my compositions, but recently have begun to explore waterways in individual, diptych and triptych formats. In Long Island City, Lake George, and New Lebanon, NY, I have concentrated on rivers, creeks, tidal marshes, and their adjacent berms and native vegetation, as well as man-made features such as boathouses, docks, and tributaries.
During 2024, with the support of a Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, I embarked on a new body of paintings depicting the waterways around Long Island City and Hunters Point. I turned my attention to the East River and Newtown Creek and local industrial features such as sprinklers, ferries, boathouses, docks, mist fountains, piers, boat launches, rip-raps, bioswales and rain gardens, as well as natural ocean waters, tidal marshes, and their adjacent berms and native vegetation. This series, like the earlier earth-related work, continues to investigate the contradictions and juxtapositions of nature in relation to man-made construction and infrastructure. It encompasses local history, indigenous flora and fauna and the ever changing landscape centered around development and environmental concerns.
My landscape paintings include diptychs, triptychs and singular works and employ a free-ranging use of perceptual cues like photos, on-site sketches and memory. A constant throughout all this work is the device of a roving grid that serves to organize while simultaneously abstract the representational subjects, and sometimes serves as a subject itself. The multi-quadrant, cinematic format reveals different seasons and times of day, diverse vantage points, and shifting psychological states, while also accentuating the mark-making and abstraction inherent to each piece. The less-than-idyllic nature of the images suggest traces of a life lived without revealing any full on dramatizations and suggest an imprint that is personal and impersonal at the same time.
–Patrick Neal