February 2011

Burroughs-Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, SC, Features Works by William Jameson

The Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, SC, is presenting the exhibit, William Jameson: Woodland Textures, featuring 18 large oil paintings, on view through Apr. 26, 2012.

Jameson credits growing up surrounded by the natural beauty and rich history of South Carolina with inspiring his childhood ambition of becoming an artist. His introspective landscapes – he prefers to call them “explorations”.

Growing up in Anderson, SC, and now living in Saluda, NC, Jameson has always felt strong ties to his native region, and his works incorporate his passion for nature. But he also draws inspiration from a wide range of artists, from the Renaissance masterpieces of Titian to the chiaroscuro paintings of Caravaggio, the rich textures of Nicolai Fechin and the spectacular treatment of light by renowned American landscape painter Winslow Homer.

“When I hike and climb in the dark creeks and streams of upstate South Carolina, North Georgia, North Carolina, and in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, wherever I turn is a painting,” Jameson writes in his artist statement. “I’m intrigued by the light filtering through the trees, striking the rocks and the rushing water over the rocks. The shadowed areas of the paintings become places for silhouetted shapes, half-lights and half darks; distant light around the turn of the creek or a ridge barely seen through the foliage.” 

David Houston, chief curator of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, describes Jameson’s paintings as “carefully considered explorations of both visible and intangible characteristics of the natural order.” Houston adds that, in the artist’s 35-year evolution as a painter, he “has traveled full circle from an early realism through minimalism and conceptualism to a reviewed but altered realism.”

Jameson writes that he is “inclined to think about the landscape without the intrusion of man and his continual need to build something; to tear up and rearrange the earth. On the other hand, it’s man’s presence that sometimes provides the provoking subject.”

Jameson’s work has been featured in one-man and invitational exhibitions from New York to California and throughout the Southeast. His work is displayed in museums and galleries around the region, and in the Art Bank of US Department of State. Jameson continues to teach painting workshops, as he has for over twenty years, throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe.

Jameson’s exhibit runs concurrently with From Tree to Treasure: An International Invitational Exhibition of Turned or Sculpted Wood. Also on display at the Museum through Feb. 26, 2012, is Wish You Were Here, a photographic documentary by Farnell & Powell.

For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at 843/238-2510 or visit (www.MyrtleBeachArtMuseum.org).

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