NYAB Event - Phyllis Floyd "Anne, Zoe, Emil & Other Subjects"

Phyllis Floyd "Anne, Zoe, Emil & Other Subjects"

First Street Gallery

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First Street Gallery presents 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.

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.

[Image: "My Dishtowels #21" (2010) watercolor, 12x16 in.]