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Indepth Arts News:
"GUEST ARTIST Phyllis Floyd, Anne, Zoe, Emil and Other Subjects"
2010-05-25 until 2010-06-19
First Street Gallery
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
First Street Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of
watercolors entitled "Anne, Zoe, Emil, & Other Subjects" by Phyllis Floyd. The two-fold exhibition is comprised of work done over the past three years both in the quiet of the studio and outdoors in Madison Square Park. The two series on display reflect contrasting but intimately related strands in Ms. Floyd's working method. In the studio she executes still lifes slowly from close observation, while in the park she is forced to paint quickly before her unwitting models get up and move away, or the sky pours rain, or the Madison Square Park crew decides to pack up the chair she's sitting on. For the challenge of composing figures on the spot she draws on the patient,
contemplative studio work she has done all her life. First Street Gallery promotes their exhibitions with a Gallery Portfolio at absolutearts.com .
In the studio, Ms. Floyd analyses her working process, intent on understanding
what she's doing; in the park she deliberately holds off such concerns,
striving to do the work without thinking. The painstaking examination of the
width of folds, the subtle tones of shadows, the precise placement of edges,
builds an intuitive grasp of composition that allows her to find in fleeting
park encounters the same lucid structure and essential form.
Whether she is looking at dishtowels allowed to fall randomly onto a table-top
or a couple sitting on a park bench, Ms. Floyd's interest is kindled and
sustained by the relationships between things. Details speak volumes: the
bodies of park-sitters converse with each other through the placement of arms
and legs, the tilt of heads. Meanwhile the seemingly innocuous dishtowels,
which Ms. Floyd originally began painting as an assignment for a group show,
have proved a rich and formidable subject, with their complexities of pattern
and drapery folds, the almost infinite variety of possible shapes these soft
yet sturdy objects can assume. Piled together, they form one abstract shape,
yet they are still treated with meticulous care as individual, common objects.
Ms. Floyd chooses to work in watercolor, which allows the painter to react
directly to the sight before her. She enjoys the challenge of applying this
notoriously difficult and unforgiving medium to the precision of the still
lifes, and appreciates the immediacy with which it conveys her vision from the
world to the paper. Of her use of watercolor, John Goodrich wrote that she
"takes advantage of the medium's unique luminosity, modulating her color
washes to catch the weight of light."
Ms. Floyd traces her interest in the types of painting she still practices to
a children's art class at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. There, at
ten, she was introduced to still life painting in the studio, and in summer
the class moved outdoors to Griffith Park. Since moving to New York she has
organized and participated in numerous group exhibitions. "Anne, Zoe, Emil &
Other Subjects" is her second solo show in recent years.
View more works from this exhibition
Visit First Street Gallery's Portfolio at absolutearts.com http://galleries.absolutearts.com/firststreetgallery
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