Feature Articles

October Issue 2001

City Art in Columbia, SC, Features Works by David Voros

David Voros: Studies from Nature opens Oct. 4 and continues through Oct. 31 in the Main Gallery at City Art in Columbia, SC.

The exhibition presents one dramatically large painting (Hyde Park, 80" x 144") and several small landscapes by David Voros, an assistant professor in the Department of Art at The University of South Carolina. The artist has received much attention this year, with shows scheduled around the state. The focus of the show at City Art will be on the landscape studies the artist has made in preparation for his larger allegorical works, studies that emerged from five places Voros and his family have lived and worked. Included in the exhibit are landscapes of Bloomington, IN, Chicago, IL, Indonesia, Tuscany, and Pritchards Island in SC.

Voros's large paintings, which draw upon mythological themes, are influenced by the tradition of landscape painting. In his formal academic training, Voros read much about that tradition, studying the works of John Constable, Goethe, John Ruskin, and others influential in the nineteenth century European landscape. He has also studied the American landscape tradition, one documented by art historian Barbara Novak in her book Nature and Culture (a text Voros frequently uses in teaching), and he is particularly drawn to the work of Frederic Church. "Painting is a landscape of sorts, an environment," Voros says. It is "an idealized state of being."

Important to Voros is the notion that art draws upon more than just one sense, that of vision. Painting on site in a specific place allows the artist to entertain these other senses and to develop an overall feeling of place. In immersing oneself in a place, Voros says, "you can feel the wind and the temperature," for example, and different places evoke different feelings. "Bloomington has this aroma about it," Voros says, "and I have a really romantic connection to it." Living in Chicago was different. There, the artist and his wife, painter Pam Bowers, lived in a coach house in the Hyde Park Kenwood neighborhood made notorious by Leopold and Loeb. They lived near the Hyde Park gardens, a place where, according to Voros, "the gardens were all run down." Voros, however, found in the park "a lost grandeur and a connection to history and art history."

In both his art and in his teaching, Voros approaches work in an interdisciplinary manner. He often shows films to his students, for example, as a way to teach concepts about painting. He is also influenced by classical literature and what he describes as its "search for a primal experience." In similar fashion, Voros is attracted to the primal landscape, a passion he shares with his wife. Together they spent time in Indonesia and Central Borneo, walking in the rainforest from village to village. Most recently, Voros took his USC students to Pritchards Island, a place, he says, "you could lose yourself in." "It's not junked up with unconsidered histories," Voros reflected. "You can feel close to the cycles."

Voros describes his work as "mythological illusions that are ultimately about a place." The show will examine Voros's synthetic "process" approach to painting as it examines the artist's affinities to landscape and to a sense of place. The works for sale at City Art, while conceived as studies for the larger paintings, hold a strength all their own.

For more information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings or call 803/252-3613 or visit their website at (http://www.cityartonline.com).

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