| For more information about this article or gallery, please call the gallery phone number listed in the last line of the article, "For more info..." |
November Issue
2010
City Art Gallery in Columbia, SC, Features
Works by Bruce Nellsmith
Homeland, a collection of new paintings by Bruce Nellsmith, will highlight the Vista Lights celebration in the main gallery at City Art in the Congaree Vista of Columbia, SC, on view from Nov. 18 through Dec. 30, 2010.Various other types of art including textiles and jewelry will be featured at City Art Gallery during the celebration.
The Homeland series of Nellsmith's paintings feature three different motifs - cityscapes, cliffs, and gorges. On the surface, a seemingly disparate selection, yet as formal compositions, they share a feeling of forms being expelled from the ground and reaching for the heavens. Said Nellsmith, "What joins them in my mind is emotional, psychological, and experiential. These motifs represent significant places in my past, my present, and most probably my future."
"When painting," he said, "I
find that I cannot accept a movement in the composition that does
not contain a certain raw or edgy quality about it. It is this
that gives the work a furtive or shifty quality that keeps me
engaged. This working and re-working process gives the paintings
an inner life, their own independent histories; they live and
I live; it's a symbiotic relationship. Simply put, my message
depends upon the manipulation of paint and the responses that
process invoke in me. I find my way into a painting and, as DeKooning
put it, I then have to paint my way back out, even though I feel
as if I am never fully released."
Identity, according to Robert Motherwell is a search for ancestors,
and if anything Nellsmith was involved in this search on a recent
trip to France. The trip was originally intended as an homage
to Cezanne. Nellsmith left his most trusted paintbrush on Cezanne's
grave site with a blessing wrapped around it - a homage to Cezanne's
formal understanding of the beauty of nature in the abstract.
Nellsmith tells his story: "I felt at home in Paris, more
so than any city that I have experienced - like I was made for
it or was made out of it. Drawing in the Bibemus Quarry on the
outskirts of Aix en Provence had a mysterious effect on me. Granted,
I was there because I was on a sort of pilgrimage to the places
that Cezanne had painted, but as I walked among the ochre limestone
cliffs that Cezanne had painted more than one hundred years ago,
it had a distinct feeling of familiarity to it, as if I already
knew it or had experienced it prior. When I returned to my studio
on Edisto Beach, SC, I exploded into a series of paintings based
on the quarry, like they had been in me all along and it wasn't
an obsessive drive but a compelling love for the quarry. The mystery
for me was why should I love it so. I can't say exactly. Perhaps
most of all was its beauty. The stones are the colors of all
flesh of all peoples."
Nellsmith often describes his work as Hans Hoffman tempered by
a dose of Cezanne - the symbolical use of color and concern with
the solidity of even the most flat abstract passages in the paintings.
These new paintings are often grand searches for something that
Nellsmith is fully aware will only be partially realized when
the paintings are completed. The search is for something that
defines that world in between the self-containment of an abstract
painting and those experiences that initially led to the creation
of the piece.
For further info check our SC Commercial Gallery listings,
contact Wendyth Wells at 803/252-3613 or visit (www.cityartonline.com).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2010 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2010 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.