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January Issue 2004
I. Pinckney Simons Galleries in both Columbia and Beaufort, SC, Offer Works by Dennis Sheehan
The I. Pinckney Simons Galleries in Columbia, SC, and Beaufort, SC, are featuring works by Dennis Sheehan during the month of Jan., 2004.
A highly accomplished
landscape artist, native Bostonian Sheehan paints in the esteemed
tradition of American Tonalism, a movement in American art that
flourished from about 1880 to 1915 and was considered as a modified
and variant form of Impressionism. The artists of the Tonalist
movement were concerned with the evocation of reverie and nostalgia
as experienced through pure landscape. They wished to transmit
"soul" in the landscape and to awaken a sense of spirituality
in the viewer through a heightened emotional response. Sheehan
is a disciple of George Inness (1825-1894) who was the earliest
American Tonalist painter. The work of both Sheehan and Inness
is imbued with soft light, blurred forms of foliage, and ambiguous
human forms.
Sheehan embraces the philosophy expressed by Inness which is:
"A work of art must have subtlety of tone and a certain amount
of mystery that can never be seen at first glance. It must be
looked at a long time before its subtle tones can be grasped;
and if it is great, it grows upon you, and the longer you look,
the more you see, and to describe it is almost impossible, because
you never see it twice a like. It changes with your mood. It is
a thing to live with. You study it; you learn to see the soul
of it. It is like a face that becomes beautiful because you have
learned to know and love the soul behind it. When a picture gives
you this effect, it is great art."
Sheehan received his artistic training at the Vesper George School
of Art (1968-71) in Boston, MA, and at the Montserrat School of
Visual Art (1971-1972) in Beverly, MA, where he was immersed in
the best traditions of the "Boston School" which advocated
classic realism. He was a proprietor and instructor in painting
at the The Art Studio in Peabody, MA, and a painting instructor
at St. Johns Preparatory School in Danvers, MA. Sheehan furthered
his study of art by working privately with Robert Cormier, 1989-1990
and Richard Whitney, 1990-1993, both former students of R. H.
Ives Gammell, an artist of the early twentieth century who upheld
the tradition of the realist painters of the Boston School. Consequently,
Sheehan was concerned with meticulous detail and painted in an
ultra realistic style during the early stages of his painting
career.
Sheehan's style, however, soon changed drastically. As recounted
in a recent article devoted to Sheehan "Identifying with
the Past" by Lori W. Simons in American Artist (Oct.
2003), upon entering a bookstore in Boston, Sheehan was so amazed
by a poster of a landscape painting that he immediately began
researching the artist of the painting. The painting was June
(1882) and the artist was George Inness. "I started spending
more time in museums, libraries, and bookstores, and I began collecting
magazine articles and art-auction catalogs on artists such as
Corot, Bruce Crane, J. Francis Murphy, Alexander Wyant, and Hugh
Bolton Jones," says Sheehan. As a result, Sheehan's mature
style has evolved into quiet, moody landscapes with dramatic tonal
contrasts. Works such as Wooded Sunset with its fiery orange
afterglow and Late October with its rich autumnal burgundies
juxtaposed to a bright blue sky testify to the fact that Sheehan's
landscapes are far from just being hues of grays and greens. He
does employ tonalism which emphasizes dark, neutral hues like
gray and brown, but then he goes beyond this with splashes of
bright color. In addition to color, there is the issue of light.
Sheehan reflects on the aspect of light in his paintings: "The
transitional period of dusk, dawn, and after a storm and even
those grayed out days in winter when the sun's light is most effusive,
these are the qualities of light that I am most interested in.
The mood that the light evokes, the color harmony and the subtleties
of tone with less emphasis on detail are of prime concern to me.
My goal is to have the painting emanate light, rather than be
just a surface that records the reflection of light. This is why
the shadow areas are important, for it is from them that this
emanation proceeds. The light areas are focal points of this effort,
but the power comes from the shadows."
The transmission of light in his paintings comes about through the intriguing reductive method in which Sheehan paints. He begins by covering his canvas with a brownish-green mixture of combined bright greens, brown madder alizarin, and orange-red pigments. While the canvas is still wet, he then removes the dark paint with a paper towel form the areas of the painting which will be lighter such as the sky or water. Sheehan then uses his finger to wipe out the sharper lines for harder elements in the work such as tree trunks and uses a bristle brush in order to draw in the branches of the trees. Lastly, he uses transparent glazes enhanced with pigments of green, blue, pink, and yellow.
Sheehan has this indefinite and mystical gift of tone that makes his paintings glow with amazing luminosity. His landscapes are imagined places waiting to be discovered by the viewer's psyche. Sheehan continues the great tradition of landscape painting while also sustaining the unique American tradition of Tonalism.
Sheehan currently has a studio in Manchester, NH.
For more information, please check our SC Commercial Gallery listings, call the Columbia gallery at 803/771-8815, the Beaufort gallery at 843/379-4774 or email to (simonsgallery@aol.com).
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