Showing posts with label Wood paintings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wood paintings. Show all posts
Ridge, 2014
The leaves are off the trees and the fields have been raked by the harvester. I can see the ridge.
3/4 view
Cropped, 2014
Early November the fields are waiting to be harvested.
Soybeans and corn, both dry on their stalks.
Soybeans and corn, both dry on their stalks.
oil on wood, 14 x 2.5 x 3, front view
3/4 view
Apple Orchard, 2014
oil on wood, 35 x 2 x 2
We inherited the apple orchard with 55 assorted fruit trees, mostly various kinds of apples and some pears, peaches and a single sour cherry. The peaches were hit hard the first winter we lived here and we lost them all. The sour cherry gave us wonderful 4th of July pies until a few years ago. We tried to keep it going but we lost the sour cherry too. The pears haven't been producing, but this year with the new bee hives our apples are WONDERFUL. Homemade applesauce for Hanukkah!
Wood Sprites, 2012-2014
Wood Sprites, my Daphne and Apollo inspired piece. I have been working on these for several years. I think they are finished now, or at least I am finished with them. They make me feel hopeful for spring.
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| 53 x 8.5 x 1, 72 x 8.25 x 1, oil on wood with live edge, |
The story of Daphne and Apollo, and two scraps of wood, inspired Pat Badt to make Sprites. Leaving the edges "live," she covered the slabs with paper and imitated the texture of their wood grain with oil paint by applying ruddy striations on the surface, achieving remarkable flesh tones reminiscent of Egyptian and European painting. She considers the taller, darker one male and the shorter, paler one female: Though separate, the pair uncannily cleaves each to the other in complicit harmony.
The piece evokes weather-red electromagnetic "sprites" that flare in the troposphere-and cloud-to-ground lightning bolts as a definition of desire: the spontaneous discharge of energy through
a charged atmosphere. Sprites explores what it means to be a pair, emphasizes the necessity of division and union in nature as a terminus for things to happen, change and change again Intervening minimally, Badt delivers poetic empiricism.
Elizabeth Johnson
Exhibited in Passing Bittersweet, Martin Center Gallery, Lafayette College, 2020
Passing Bittersweet features work that embodies ideas garnered from reading Lafayette alumnus Ross Gay's The Book of Delights. His chatty, humorous, open ended essays were culled from a year of daily asking himself: "What delights me?" Self-study and identity merge with the places, people, books, and routines that make Ross Gay happy. From inside what he calls "intense fleeting attentions," Gay maintains a practice of acknowledging what is beautiful in the midst of the brutal.
The artists of Passing Bittersweet were chosen not because they illustrate Gay's delights or process, but because their personal delights find aesthetic, physical ways to reframe negativity. The gathered artworks echo Gay's conviction that numberless, small, positive human actions and transactions dispel what is dark, lonely and unjust. Passing Bittersweet honors Ross Gay,The Book of Delights, and artists who validate vulnerable, peripheral,and oft-overloo.ked treasures of common experience.
Elizabeth Johnson, curator
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