Valley House Gallery presents: Lilian Garcia-Roig: Autumn Spectacles

by PegNews wire

Valley House Gallery is pleased to present Lilian Garcia-Roig's "Autumn Spectacles" from January 23 – February 28, 2009.

Fall color animates Lilian Garcia-Roig’s Maximalist landscapes painted on site in Texas, Florida, New Hampshire, Alabama, and Washington in her sixth exhibition since 1994 at Valley House Gallery. In “Autumn Spectacles” Cuban American artist Lilian Garcia-Roig shows over 30 paintings. Many were completed during a fall sabbatical from Florida State University. She yearned to work in a bolder palette and in a bigger scale than her fall teaching schedule permits, and used her sabbatical time to travel widely. She returned to Texas to paint for the first time in ten years. In October she had a second residency at The MacDowell Colony, where the New Hampshire works in this exhibition were painted. In preparation for a solo show at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama, she painted in Alabama for the first time.

Even though painting on site is a centuries old tradition, Garcia-Roig completely breaks away from the traditional approach. Instead of picturesque vistas, Garcia-Roig prefers the complexity of densely wooded areas. Instead of capturing an “Impressionist” moment of time, Garcia-Roig prefers the challenge of incorporating multiple light dramas that occur throughout the day into one painting. Her technique of wet-on-wet application allows her to paint quickly and intensely all day. The resulting paintings emphasize surface over subject.

Garcia-Roig describes her painting philosophy as follows:

“My formal painting concerns have led me to use the conservative landscape as my subject and traditional plein-air painting as my process, in my attempts to reconcile the abstract nature of painting with its representational role. From a distance, I draw the viewer into what is first perceived as a dense but conventional space. Up close, however, the images break down; the lush, gestural paint marks, squeezed-out paint patches and areas of raw canvas help, instead, to reinforce the 2-D character of abstract painting as both an activity and an end-product.”

“By definition, plein-air painting means to work on-site, to experience nature first-hand. For me, this seemingly passe mode of painting is today injected with new relevance and urgency as it helps underscore how removed most of our own experiences and even images of nature have become. In my works, I want the viewer to discover how the landscape reveals itself in cumulative and unexpected ways. Ways that will hopefully create a desire to engage more fully, directly and positively in our own environment and to do so before it is too late.”

In addition to her exhibition at Valley House, she has a solo show, “Nature of Being There,” on view at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison College in Fort Myers, Florida, January 16 – February 21, 2009. Also, twelve of Garcia-Roig’s New England paintings will be included in the “Medium Unbounded” exhibition opening on February 20th at the Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC, and continuing through April 14, 2009.

Lilian Garcia-Roig was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1966 and reared in Houston. She earned her BFA in 1988 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. She first began using the landscape as a subject during a residency at Skowhegan, Maine, in 1990; before then her paintings were figurative. Garcia-Roig was a professor in the Department of Art at the University of Texas in Austin for nine years and she has been a full professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee since 2002.

Source: Valley House Gallery

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