NYAB Event - Betsy Eby "Scales and Measures"

Betsy Eby "Scales and Measures"

Winston Wachter Fine Art

This event has ended.

Winston Wächter Fine Art presents an exhibition of new work by painter Betsy Eby. In this, her fifth solo show at the gallery, Eby makes her most thorough exploration of the representation of musical ideas through her finely honed encaustic technique.

A classically trained pianist whose daily practice is an integral part of her art making, Eby continues the historic dialogue between painters and musicians who alluded to double entendres between the visible and audible world. Eby attempts to convey the feeling of music by “making visible” a particular piece of music with each painting in this show.

Claude Debussy entitled his paintings Images with the goal of creating “Aural illusions.” “What I am doing is the inverse of that,” explains the artist. With titles like Variation upon A Night on a Bare Mountain and Voiles, the paintings resonate something barely within grasp, as lyrical lines and gestures sweep calligraphically over each canvas, with the vertical edge serving metaphorically as the measure line.

Eby’s palette and unique encaustic technique are key components in her musical project. The exhibition as a whole is viewed as a single composition. One sees a rich and nuanced range of sepia, grey and silver tones on parchment colored grounds, punctuated by the occasional burst of red or yellow. Each individual painting can also be considered as its own musical composition: the forms that emerge from their milky background can be understood as notes on a score as well as an element of the particular piece of music represented by that particular painting. The qualities that wax and paint can achieve together, as only Eby can manipulate them, draw the viewer into her lush, romantic, musical world.