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January Issue 2007
City Art Gallery in Columbia, SC, Offers Works by Tarleton Blackwell
City
Art Gallery in Columbia, SC, will present the exhibition, Tarleton
Blackwell: New Works, opening on Jan. 25 and continuing through
Mar. 31,2007.
The exhibit will showcase new and rarely exhibited work by one of the region's most acclaimed artists. Fans of Blackwell's celebrated Hog Series will be treated with the latest work in this Southern-drenched morality tail, and those who thought they knew the artist will be surprised by his abstract and non-objective paintings.
One of the most imaginative and gifted artists
that the state of South Carolina has ever produced, Blackwell
now finds himself in a new phase of an already stellar career.
Having served for five years as a visiting professor at the University
of North Carolina Pembroke and where he held an endowed chair,
Blackwell is now back home in Alcolu, SC, just outside of Manning,
SC, ready to embark on making new work. Though comfortable in
his rural surroundings, the source of his artistic inspiration,
the artist has met increasing enthusiastic audiences far beyond
Clarendon County.
National and international audiences have embraced The Hog
Series, his 20-year magnum opus of the rural South that now
numbers over 250 individual works. His paintings have appeared
in over 170 museums and galleries throughout the country. In anticipation
of the new show at City Art Blackwell says, "I have quite
a few new ideas so that I'm not ready to close The Hog Series
just now." As the new show at City Art will testify, he also
admits a desire to embrace a wider artistic agenda.
Blackwell says that with the new paintings in The Hog Series, he was reinvigorated by a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last spring. There he re-acquainted himself with the paintings of the seventeenth century Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez, on whose imagery and compositions Blackwell heavily draws. Velázquez's depictions of the court of Philip IV have made their way into many of Blackwell's work, from the largest paintings such as Las Meninas through the smaller works on paper in mixed media and colored pencil.
Equally at play in Blackwell's visual world are children's storybooks, commercial images, and the animal world, both real and metaphorical, of rural South Carolina. With the new works at City Art, expect to see some of Blackwell's iconic animal portraits. "There's a rooster that is part of The Hog Series," he says. "He's a red rooster, and he has a red shirt, and also he's wearing these gloves. He has military medals on his chest. My intention was to create a Southern piece that reflects the rule of the South." Though never one to admit any potential meanings of the work, Blackwell coyly adds, "When we were growing up we had roosters." A recent exhibition at the Carnegie Center in Cincinnati featured some of the large Hog Series paintings, and the public reception was great.
Some work in the exhibit will surprise followers of Blackwell namely, the abstract paintings and landscapes, work that he has always created and shown outside of South Carolina but rarely close to home. He says, "In my opinion they are really the same the same surface quality as one would see in The Hog Series. In these the colors are the subject, but they are changing. The palette seems to be much brighter than in The Hog Series. There you would see more grays." Also City Art will show the artist's landscapes, ones inspired by both memory and imagination. "They could be landscapes from the region but not necessarily, " Blackwell says. "The area around my home in Clarendon County varies within just a short distance cypress swamps, for example, to farmland."
Always with the world of Tarleton Blackwell one finds a concrete source of regional reference, but that world always opens up into a rich space of personal imagination, one that celebrates the history of painting itself.
For more info check our SC Commercial Gallery
listings, call the gallery at 803/252-3613 or visit (www.cityartonline.com).
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