NYAB Event - "Up in the Air" Exhibition

"Up in the Air" Exhibition

Tria Gallery

This event has ended.

On display will be five mid-sized and large colorful, textured canvases by each of the two artists. The artists' styles vary, but the common vocabulary here of shape, color and texture, essential to the overall process of each painter, guides their respective compositional developments. This pairing creates an explosion of color and mood. Both artists' palettes are earthy, but d'Inverno's are soft and subtle while Gwaltney's are bold and energy-filled. Both saturate their canvases with expansive swatches of cinnabar red, turquoise, orange, green, and blue. The colors stretch and swirl energetically within the confines of the canvases, and at the same time seem to spill off and fill the surrounding space. Layering, scraping, and changing direction are all part of the process. The final result is always unexpected.

According to d'Inverno, "Up in the Air" speaks of possibilities of expression and of surprise. The work is primarily about story telling and how words appear on a page to tell the story. "I love how poetry looks on paper and I'm interested in Cuneiform and Etruscan letters/words. When I paint, words are like colors in my mind, so I try to translate that on the painting." Ms. d'Inverno's primary technique is "wet on wet" - not waiting for the layers of oil paint to dry until the work is completed. As she also notes, "chance plays a vital part in the development of the work."
For Gwaltney there is also an element of surprise in the creation, and he finds "pleasure in the arguments created from color combinations." In discussing the painters who have influenced his work, he names Twombly, Mitchell, Serra, de Kooning, Deibenkorn and Still. "The splatterers, doodlers and sloppy scribblers interest me and I distrust too high a degree of finish". As it relates to his own work, he likes to "let the paint do what it will" although he "still gets in the way". Ultimately, he claims to be a better editor then inventor. He uses horizontal bands of paint in his work to "contain or constrain the chaos beneath." The final product is thus one of both process and chance.