Claire McConaughy “Not So Far Away”

The Painting Center

[Image: Claire McConaughy "Suede Blue Lake" (2019) oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in.]

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The Painting Center presents the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Claire McConaughy entitled Not So Far Away: Paintings by Claire McConaughy. McConaughy.

McConaughy’s exhibit features 10 paintings of trees within a landscape that evoke a mood of timelessness, while the ephemeral light captured by McConaughy infuses the paintings with a sense of observed reality to a time of day or season.

Barbara O’Brien, in her catalog essay, Feeling Tone: Claire McConaughy’s Landscapes, writes “The memory of the experience—place, stance, time of day, combined with the natural phenomena of the shifting light on the surface of the water and even the temperature of the air suggested by the quality of light—is described in the paintings without being reproduced, replicated, or illustrated. McConaughy’s paintings offer the opportunity to stand where she stood, see what she saw, and to understand that the translation of her experience—into paintings of great formal command and emotional depth—becomes our own.”

Painting in her studio while referencing photographs she has taken, McConaughy’s subtle sense of space is a delicate construction of multiple distances within the painting itself, and also without. There is a delineation of foreground, midground and background that provides the viewer a specific location either directly adjacent to the landscape or just outside the frame where you can easily wander into the scene. The size of the paintings from small and intimate to referencing a human scale and drama, also invites one into over an open-ended conversation with painting, and by extension the artist, leaving the narrative to be discovered McConaughy’s striking visual form of intensely gestural blunt brushstrokes loaded with pigments of striking yellows, hot pinks and lush greens, are juxtaposed by gentle languid swaths of cool blues, creamy grays, and earthy browns.

Claire McConaughy lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. McConaughy has had over 50 solo and group exhibitions at distinguished galleries such as The Drawing Center, Art Resources Transfer, Boston Center for the Arts, Lichtunfire, Jay Grimm Gallery, TZ Art & Company, and Drawing Rooms, in addition to being on the staff of the influential art journal, New Observations. Her work is in the collections of JP Morgan and Sony Music with media coverage including Artnet and the Boston Herald. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Ucross Foundation and a Mid-Atlantic/NEA Visual Arts Fellowship finalist. McConaughy received her MFA from Columbia University, NYC, and BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh.