Protistan - Charles Greeley
Santa Fe painter and mixed-media artist Charles Greeley will open the show season at the gallery on Friday, May 25 with a one-man show of his paintings and Japanese paper collages.
The show will focus around Charles’s bold acrylic paintings. Finely wrought and intricately imagined, the work explores the landscapes of the imagination.
“The paintings in the show are of a spontaneous cosmogony resulting from brushstrokes and doodling with acrylic paint on canvas,” Charles says. “Multi-layers of dots, crosshatching, and wash effects create a harmonious whole that vaguely resembles a visionary landscape.”
Cordova - Charles Greeley
The paintings in the show will be complemented by his collages, which rework and reimagine the landscapes of the Southwest through the medium of Japanese paper. Elaborately detailed, each piece consists of hundreds of precisely placed pieces of paper. The result is a layered fusion of shape and color that captures the essence of the original scene while revealing a quality that was previously unseen.
“I began doing very detailed work in the late ‘60s in all kinds of media using lots of patterning,” Charles says. “The heavily silk screened Japanese patterned mulberry papers allowed me to do this type of detailed work in much less time than painting them”
In both the collage work and the paintings, he draws inspiration from the visionary, surreal and romantic painters of the past, including Redon, Moreau, and Bresden. But his ultimate inspiration comes from nature itself. The Glorieta Pass of Northern New Mexico, where he has lived with his wife and fellow artist, Bunny Tobias, since the ‘70s, provides a bounty of scenes from which to draw.
“I believe that nature is the realm of the miraculous and that art is one of the avenues used to experience this,” he says. “Living in New Mexico for 40 years has added to my consciousness a greater awareness of light and its many nuances.”
We invite you to join us for the show’s artist’s reception at the gallery on Friday, May 25 from 5 to 7 p.m.
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