Portland, OR. – The Jeffrey Thomas Fine Art gallery inaugurates its 2nd season of art exhibitions with Visions and Revisions: A Five Year Conversation, a group show that opens Wednesday, January 20 and runs through Saturday, February 27, 2016.
Visions and Revisions: A Five Year Conversation is installed as a visual dialogue among a group of seven friends who are painters, each with a very different approach to the process of
mark-making. For the past five years, however, they have committed to meet together as a group to engage, challenge, support and share an intense love affair with paint. The artists in this group include:
· Jef Gunn (Courtesy of the Augen Gallery)
· Clinton MacKenzie
· Claire Browne
· Stephanie Doyle
· Pat Barrett
· Trude Parkinson (Courtesy of the Augen Gallery)
· Andrea Schwartz-Feit (Courtesy of the Butters Gallery)
Each of these artists has taken a different path in their careers as professional artists and because several are represented by different galleries, it is a rare treat for both the public and the artists to see the work exhibited together for the first time. Visions and Revisions: A Five Year Conversation is the result of persuading these seven artists to meet together again, but this time it will be their work hanging out together, and their work will have to speak for itself, promoting conversation of a different sort.
This is a show about painting. These seven different artists are bound together by paint but each artist has taken very different approach to the application of paint and painted imagery. Each of these artists has also cultivated a visual territory with a particular impact, exposing the challenges and choices that the act of painting presents to an artist. Personal visions are modulated by the group dynamic of peer feedback, and this leads to further revisions of scale, palette, design and concept. These are the visions and revisions of the exhibition’s theme.
Visions and Revisions: A Five Year Conversation examines whether the primal and intuitive expression of mark-making can transcend intellectual theories and postures about what makes art contemporary. This exhibition also celebrates the distinct resilience that makes the Portland art scene so vibrant and diverse: because the metropolitan area is small and that lends an intimacy sense of shared community. After five years of regular meetings, the members of this group express a thoughtfulness of attention to each other’s work and ideas that are collaborative.
“Striking also, especially when looking at work, is the fact that most of us have been or currently are teachers. As teachers, we have practiced looking at work and communicating for the benefit of our students. That enhances our ability to be of use to each other.“
– Andrea Schwartz-Feit
In Visions and Revisions: A Five Year Conversation, this group has chosen to pursue collaboration and community in building their separate artistic practices. Jeffrey Thomas Fine Art believes it is essential to keep significant NW artists in front of the public through focused group shows such as this one, each devoted to an important theme that can be explored by placing different artworks in a “visual conversation” with each other.