Woody Gwyn NEXT TO NATURE
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Woody Gwyn Next to Nature
July 26 - August 25, 2019
Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: Azul, 2017-2019, egg tempera on panel, 36 x 48 inches
Woody Gwyn: Next to Nature “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.” Walt Whitman
The places Woody Gwyn takes us feel like they have been shared in secret, part of a private search for something ineffable. With Gwyn, we are held aloft above an empty patch of sea, our view unencumbered by any solid thing. Far out in the desert, beside the highway at the knuckles of the reach of civilization, we find temporary quiet looking out over a guardrail at an empty bank. Here, above the water, next to the highway, we feel more in tune with the true story—and personality—of the earth. Though he is known for an incredible level of detail, clarity of light, and an unconventional approach to composition, Gwyn might more succinctly describe his art work as part of a search for the “truth of the land.” For Gwyn, that truth would seem to exist in the most unexpected subjects, found only through a meticulous attention to the smallest slivers of visual information. The new paintings and works on paper included in this exhibition, entitled Next to Nature, manifest this truth-seeking impetus at a variety of scales and in a variety of scenes that each reflect his sensibilities in different ways. Whether in an enveloping, 10-foot egg tempera painting or a small drawing on paper, Gwyn crafts images of unlikely subjects with an almost devotional attitude toward detail: trees with countless leaves and blossoms, oceans with thousands of finely painted waves, wide expanses of grass, brush, and innumerable blades and branches. Having moved from his West Texas home in 1974, Gwyn found in New Mexico the aweinspiring sense of space and scale the ideal environment to center his artistic practice. Since then, Gwyn has spent the last forty-five years in New Mexico. He was hailed in 2013 as part of the “Holy Trinity” of Santa Fe landscape painting by art critic and curator John O’Hern, and in 2010 Gwyn was the recipient of New Mexico’s highest artistic honor, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for Painting. He is recognized as one of today’s finest realist painters of the American landscape. Gwyn’s work usually begins, in his own words, "out in the field" with plein air sketches and 2
watercolors, which act as direct and immediate record of his observations and impressions on site. He paints exactingly from close study of his subject, whether shimmering seacoast, highway vista, arboreal image, starry sky or southwestern mesa. In the current exhibition, works such as El Dorado and Hondo translate the awesome scale of the land and sky and evoke an astounding clarity of light characteristic of Northern New Mexico. Also included are several tranquil water paintings: sweeping horizontal views of New Mexico bodies of water, as in San Gregorio, or the dramatic coastlines of California, as in Big Sur. Next to Nature also includes several of Gwyn’s works on paper, including drawings and etchings that embody his approach to evoking the grandeur in the ordinary details of the natural world. In graphite, we glimpse more closely the moment-by-moment, systematic reincarnation of his subject matter onto the page. The show also features several monumental works, one a part of his acclaimed series of highway paintings. Ragged Point is a ten-foot long masterwork that unearths a sense of majesty from a curving segment of seaside highway, the painting itself evenly bisected by a guardrail in the foreground. Art historian Sharyn Udall describes Gwyn’s highway paintings as examples of his interest in painting subjects that “press quietly beyond what they describe.” She writes, “Disguised in the persuasive truth-telling of realism, Gwyn’s paintings invite us to explore realms where nature and culture test mysterious new affinities.” Other paintings demonstrate Gwyn’s fondness for the richness inherent in the repetition of small details—blades of grass, water ripples, even tufts of brush that dot a hill. In Bear Creek, leaves on the surface of the water—each with its own orientation and directionality—generate a sense of rhythm that sweeps away from the viewer as the eye move upwards along the surface of the water towards a shadowy bank. In El Dorado, a hill rises into fog, its numerous bushes slowly fading away, losing corporeality, and suggesting a feeling of ascension. Despite the remarkable intricacy of each square inch of canvas, panel, or paper, Gwyn’s 3
art retains a feeling of simplicity, of almost haiku succinctness. Looking across his paintings, one notices his tendency to boldly crop his subjects; in Ragged Point, for example, Gwyn shows us the road, not what the road leads to. In Ocean, Gwyn centers our attention on a patch of sea with barely a hint of horizon. Here, Gwyn omits the sky and sun from the picture plane, portraying little else beyond an infinitely unfolding expanse of water. Gwyn instead folds the sun and sky into each glint of water, ten thousand suns in ten thousand swaying reflections. Though he paints within the modality of realism, Gwyn transfigures his landscapes through unorthodox decisions like these concerning subject matter and composition: in effect, where he decides to train the eye of his viewer. In many ways, Gwyn’s work straddles the line between what we are socialized to pay attention to and what we are socialized to ignore: a rusty guardrail, a wasp’s nest, an estuary, a remote expanse of ocean. Choices of subject matter such as these—and composition, as noted above—seem to exist as intonations of an artist who is aware that depictions of the land are also, by necessity, depictions of those who view, inhabit, or paint it. In a statement accompanying the exhibition, Gwyn writes, “Jackson Pollock famously said, ‘I am nature.’ The truth is that we are all nature. It is my belief that we yearn to experience the mystery, truth, and beauty in nature. In doing so, it is our own selves that we sense coming to us with a certain majesty.” That transfiguration of the landscape – one that is mindful of space, edge, and surface – seems also to be emblematic of a systematic approach to the picture plane that hints at modes of abstraction. In Azul, we look out beyond two hills at the water beyond, one hill bathed in light and the other in shadow. The neatly divided composition recalls the tenuous abstractions of Morris Louis: open-ended white space framed by colorful diagonals. Perhaps these compositional inclinations sprang from a single unconscious source – the feeling of a gateway, of peering out through a fixed foreground towards an infinite beyond. By accentuating the bare geometry of forms in this and other works such as Big Sur and Eucalyptus, Gwyn applies a treatment of the landscape that is thoroughly contemporary. In the smallest details of his most quotidian subjects, Gwyn provides us with a roadmap to seeing the magnificence of things that hide in plain sight. He urges us to look, to notice, and to take stock of the elemental fibers of what surrounds us and which in turn builds our sense of 4
ourselves. In a 2014 interview with the New Mexico PBS, Gwyn said, “The great danger of realism is that the content, the emotional impact of the work, is such that it does not get beyond illustration. I like abstraction that seems rooted in reality, and realism that is rooted in abstraction. That’s why I like so many of [Georgia] O’Keefe’s abstractions, because they came out of real events of her life.” For Gwyn, this must indicate that his paintings are sprung from offerings of some other, nonverbal sort of truth—one that he might refer to as intuition, but which manifests itself as a perspective inimitably Gwyn. Woody Gwyn was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1944, and received his arts education from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. For fifty years, his work has been presented in a wide array of premier galleries. His work has been exhibited in national and international museums including the Tel Aviv Museum in Tel Aviv, Israel; le Centre Nationale des Arts Plastiques in Paris, France; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery of George Washington University in Washington, DC; and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Gwyn was the 2010 recipient of New Mexico’s highest artistic honor, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for Painting. Alex Gill
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Ragged Point, 2018 egg tempera, 60 x 120 inches 7
Summer Coast II, 2018-2019, egg tempera on panel, 36 x 36 inches
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Ocean, 2019, oil on panel, 36 x 36 inches 9
Wasp's Nest, 2018-2019, graphite on paper, 10.875 x 9.75 inches 10
Bear Creek, 2017-2019, egg tempera on panel, 84 x 48 inches 11
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El Dorado, 2018 egg tempera on panel, 29.5 x 120 inches 13
Pecos Valley, 2018, oil on panel, 8.75 x 13.875 inches 14
San Patricio, 2018-2019, oil on panel, 7.5 x 15.5 inches 15
Estuary, 2017-2019, oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches
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Big Sur, 2019, oil on panel, 5 x 11.75 inches
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Naciamento (Birthplace), 2018-2019, oil on panel, 11.875 x 21 inches 18
Summer Coast I, 2018-2019, egg tempera on paper, 21.75 x 21 inches 19
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Villanueva, 2019 oil on panel, 10 x 30 inches 21
Ocean/Cloud, 2019, oil on panel, 8 x 8 inches 22
Azul, 2018, oil on panel, 7.75 x 9.75 inches 23
Eve, 2005 acrylic on canvas, 72.5 x 35.5 inches 24
Rama Red, 2005 acrylic on canvas, 72 x 38.5 inches 25
Estuary, 2019, oil on panel, 6.25 x 10.625 inches
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Cora Cora, 2004 acrylic on canvas, 16 x 78 inches 27
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Pacific Coast Highway, 2018-2019, mixed media on paper, 7.5 x 43.25 inches 29
Eucalyptus, 2019, hand tinted etching, 9 x 9.625 inches 30
Roswell Windbreak, 2019, egg tempera on panel, 60 x 60 inches 31
Comanche Gap, oil on linen, 29.75 x 36 inches 32
Woody Gwyn
(b. 1944: San Antonio, Texas)
EDUCATION
The Art Center of Waco, Waco, TX; The Museum
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX; and The
Amarillo Art Center, Amarillo, TX
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1983 Davis-McClain Galleries, Houston, TX
2019
Next to Nature, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
1982 Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY
2016
American Vista, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
1981 Heydt/Bair Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
2015 Solitary Places, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
1980 Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY
2014
Recent Landscapes, David Findlay Jr. Fine Art,
1978 Elaine Horwitch Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
New York, NY; also 2010, 2006, and 2005
1977 Meredith Long & Co., Houston, TX; also 1975,
2013
Santa Fe’s Holy Trinity of Landscape Painting,
LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
1965 Woody Gwyn, Canyon Art Gallery, Canyon TX
2012
Elements of Landscape, LewAllen Galleries,
Santa Fe, NM
SELECTED GRANTS AND AWARDS
American Landscapes, George Washington
2010 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence
University, Luther Brady Gallery, Washington, DC
2009
Modernism, San Francisco, CA; also 2006, 1986,
1979 National Endowment of the Arts Grant
and 1984
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; also 2007,
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
2004, 2003, 2002, and 1988
Albuquerque Museum of Art, Albuquerque, NM
2005
Woody Gwyn Revisited, Museum of the
The Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX
Southwest, Midland, TX
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
2000
MB Modern, New York, NY
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO
1998
Woody Gwyn: Artist of the Year, Assembly of the
Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN
Arts, Midland, TX
Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York, NY
1997
Cline-LewAllen Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Harvard University, Boston, MA
1996
Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York, NY;
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
also 1994, 1992, 1991, and 1989
Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL
1995
Horwitch-LewAllen Gallery,
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Santa Fe, NM
Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM
1987
Foxley-Leach Gallery, Washington, DC
Museum of the Southwest, Midland, TX
1974,1973,1972, 1971, 1970, 1969, 1968, 1965
in the Arts
1986 Modernism Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
1986 New Works by Woody Gwyn (Travelling
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Exhibition): Museum of the Southwest, Midland,
Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY
TX; McAllen International Museum, McAllen, TX; 33 Reading Public Museum & Art Gallery, Reading, PA
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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com Š 2019 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC 36 Artwork Š Woody Gwyn