NYAB Event - Kay WalkingStick "Living in the City, Painting in the Wild"

Kay WalkingStick "Living in the City, Painting in the Wild"

June Kelly Gallery

This event has ended.

Living in the City, Painting in the Wild, an exhibition of new paintings by Kay WalkingStick – haunting yet alluring landscapes that represent a significant departure from the mystical mountains, abstract shapes and patterns of her earlier work -- will open at the June Kelly Gallery on April 1. The exhibition will remain on view through May 7.

WalkingStick shows us in the new works how she relates abstraction to the more literal and how both depict a poignant and poetic sense of timelessness, sound, movement and larger-than-life wonderment of the landscape.

WalkingStick says she has been painting landscape all her life, yet it has not always been the focus of her work. But increasingly, her images had come to include history, art history, geography and specific place, as opposed to an earlier emphasis on “expressive landscape as metaphor or symbol.”

In her new paintings, all diptychs, WalkingStick directs her focus to the landscape itself. Among her subjects is the Ramapo River in Northern New Jersey just 45 minutes west of Manhattan; she is there taking in the seasonal sounds and visual nuances. “It is lovely anytime of the year,”she says. WalkingStick is captivated by and driven to depicting the seasonal beauty of the area.

WalkingStick combines panels of gold and other metallic leaf with the landscape imagery to reinforce its reflection, to give a sense of largeness that transcends the more literal landscape depiction … “to give it the distance from the mundane that the scene gives to me.”

In her new landscapes, WalkingStick uses the panels of her diptychs to express differing views of the location as well as different times of day. Abstraction is always there, she says. The mere act of looking away and looking back is separation enough to alter the original perception.

WalkingStick lives and works in New York City. She holds a BFA from Arcadia University (formerly Beaver College), Glenside, Pennsylvania, and an MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York.