the daughter (r.) and her cousin, both scheduled to be married next Spring ~ (embiggenable)
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WENT TO AN EXHIBITION OPENING (at an university gallery)-PAINTINGS, solo artist-THIS FRIDAY PAST. I was quite disappointed by what I saw even though, after seeing the work online, I was expecting a different reaction.
The work is described as “realist”-not photo-realism-in style. The subject matter was a large local family on their farm. Portraits of family members working on the farm as well as landscape scenes of the farm and its buildings. A review of the work focused on the artist’s ability to capture quality of “the light” as encountered in situ. View the work here.
As I understand it-as told to me by a member of the farm family who is marrying our daughter (as seen above making a selfie)-the artist works from photos. I found that interesting-but not unusual-inasmuch as my ultimate feeling, re; the work, is that the exact same images would have made a much better impression, to my eye and sensibilities, if they were presented as photographs instead of paintings - a take that stands in contrast to the oft-stated notion of, “That photograph looks like a painting.”
FYI, one of the primary issues I had with the exhibition was that, surprisingly, the galley lighting was not daylight balanced (5400K). Rather, it appeared to be closer to tungsten (3200K) which caused the colors of the paintings to have a warm, yellow-ish tint / cast that was quite unlike the more more neutral / “clean” look of the work as seen online.
I asked the artist about this fact and he said that he thought that the lightning enhanced the look of his work. A response which befuddled me no small amount inasmuch as it seems inconceivable to me that an artist who takes care in the selection the color to apply to his/her paintings wouldn’t seem to care about how they look on a gallery wall. That notion stands in direct opposition to how I process my work for printing in that, a hallmark of my prints, is very clean color which is intended to convey to a viewer, as accurately as the medium allows, how the world looked at the moment when I made any given picture.
Given the fact that the artist was lauded by his ability to capture the quality “the light”, I thought that the gallery lighting worked in significant opposition to that characteristic of the work. So much so, that it spoiled the entire viewing experience for me.