Ron Milewicz “Light Takes the Tree”

The New York Studio School

[Image: Ron Milewicz "Sun and Oak" (2018) pencil on paper, 18 x 13 1/2 in.]

This event has ended.

The New York Studio School presents Ron Milewicz; Light Takes the Tree. The exhibition will feature a selection of small to mid-sized graphite drawings on paper.

Milewicz’s works depict rural sites in the New York Hudson Valley. As Aimée Brown Price writes in her exhibition essay, these “landscapes are not the sweeping perspectives of majestic mountains, vast seas, or overpowering cataclysmic natural events, designed to strike awe at their grandeur, but views of woods and meadows, outcroppings and ponds. They celebrate slim, bare trees with graceful branches; foliage and forest bowers. Arabesque shapes and rolling spaces … are integrated to become rhythmic forms activated by a closely observed and perspicacious play of light and shadow.”

She continues: “Light is important. Shimmering, vaporous light and shadow inhabit and rhythmically enliven settings. Shafts of light introduce movement, pierce foliage, obliterate forms… . Tones, tonal structure, tonal relationships are paramount to the character and beauty of these drawings.”

Through carefully calibrated shifts of tone and delicately balanced compositions, Milewicz achieves what Brown Price describes as a “noiseless other-worldliness.” While the lyricism and the invitation to draw sustenance from nature is evident, these drawings also subtly press us to recognize the mystery as well as the undercurrent of vulnerability and mortality present even in this close-at-hand landscape. They embrace the paradoxes and ambiguities of Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Waking”:

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Ron Milewicz lives and works in New York City and Gallatin, New York. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, studied art history at Cornell University (1979-83), received a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture (1983-86), and attended the New York Studio School (1990-1994), where he taught from 2000 to 2016. He is represented by the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York City.

A concurrent exhibition of Milewicz’s landscape paintings, “Circumstances,” is being held at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, through March 24, 2019.