Martha Armstrong
APPOINTMENTS FOR GENERAL VISITS ARE ENCOURAGED BUT NOT REQUIRED
Dale Roberts: Activated by Light
Dale Roberts is unflinchingly dedicated to color and texture in his signature encaustic paintings and he consistently brings a lively, experimental approach to the representation of his subject matter. He finds beauty in sources as disparate as a gritty urban landscape, his backyard garden, or a selection of familiar objects - scenes that are common and often overlooked.
From flotsam and graffiti to cool, colorful tableaus of his studio workbench, Roberts’ artistic approach fluctuates between representation and abstraction. The artist’s fascination with experimentation leads him to celebrate the possibilities inherent in his chosen mediums while the resulting surfaces of the paintings are often as captivating as the images themselves.
Alexandra Tyng: The Architecture of Connection
A viewer is swept into a cinematic world of mystery in Alexandra Tyng’s new exhibition at Gross McCleaf, The Architecture of Connection. Well known for her portrait painting, Tyng is also a skilled interpreter of visual narratives related to mythology and dreams. Utilizing the same technical proficiency as in her portraits, Tyng captivates and intrigues with these more complex paintings. Her perspectival lines place the viewer within the composition, and illusive, yet familiar, worlds begin to unfold.
Tyng spends a great deal of time with each painting, articulating intricate details and rich lighting effects with her distinct painted mark. She is a careful observer and reliable narrator of natural settings and the human figure. Many of her works borrow from the tropes of Greek and Roman mythology. For example, in Tyng’s painting, The Shadow of Abundance, the main character, reminiscent of Botticelli’s Flora, lounges in the mid-ground among fruits and flowers. The setting is a mystical woodland and the central figure is accompanied by an expressly contemporary flutist and a mischievous Cupid.
Larry Day at 100
Larry Day At 100 celebrates the centennial anniversary of the birth of Philadelphia born-and-bred, internationally admired artist Larry Day (1921-1998). The Gross McCleaf exhibition accompanies the three-venue retrospective, Body Language: The Art of Larry Day, divided among major Philadelphia-area institutions: Woodmere Art Museum (through January 23, 2022); Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts (through December 3), and Arcadia Exhibitions at Arcadia University (now closed).
Known during his lifetime as the Dean of Philadelphia painters, Day’s work was exhibited in a dozen solo and many group exhibitions at Gross McCleaf, his primary gallery in his home city. Larry Day At 100 welcomes Day back with a career overview of more than 20 works: early abstractions, figurative, and geometric architectural compositions, on both canvas and paper, exploring oil, watercolor, and a range of drawing media.
Scott Noel featured in John Thornton's Scott Noel, To Become an Artist
Artist Scott Noel is an evangelist for painting from direct observation. It was great to talk to him at his opening. I wanted to learn his thoughts about how his way of being an artist is holding up in our changing times.
Bethann Parker featured in John Thornton's Almanac, The Visionary Art of Bethann Parker
I first met the visionary artist Bethann Parker at the Pennsylvania Academy’s 2019 annual student exhibition. So it was a tremendous joy to see her again last Saturday at the opening of her first solo show at Gross McCleaf. She and her husband and kids live “off the grid” in the Pocono mountains...
PAFA Fellowship 2021 Exhibition featured on John Thornton’s YouTube Channel
The PAFA Fellowship 2021 Exhibition is part virtual and part in person, at the Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia. Fellowship President Barbara Sosson talks about the organization and Miriam Seidel comments about some of the prize winning artworks.
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“This present body of work is a deeper exploration into ways of seeing and translating the visible world into a variety of mediums. These paintings celebrate the inherent qualities of each medium, be they metalpoint, gouache, or encaustic. I am moved to return again and again to individual works and themes as possibilities continue to emerge and change throughout the painting process.”
-Dale Roberts
Dale Roberts is unflinchingly dedicated to color and texture in his signature encaustic paintings and he consistently brings a lively, experimental approach to the representation of his subject matter. He finds beauty in sources as disparate as a gritty urban landscape, his backyard garden, or a selection of familiar objects - scenes that are common and often overlooked. From flotsam and graffiti to cool, colorful tableaus of his studio workbench, Roberts’ artistic approach fluctuates between representation and abstraction.
In 2019, Ann Lofquist returned to her beloved New England after 12 years in Southern California. She had lived in Maine for 20 years and her atmospheric paintings of fields, farms, and streams were uniquely recognizable. The landscape had changed while she was away, however. “I often revisit my favorite vistas and upon returning to New England, I was struck by how much they had changed during my 12-year absence,” she explains. “For the most part, the changes were (from my point of view) for the worse. Favorite trees had been felled, creeks were now choked by invasive knotweed and old dairy farms had been abandoned and the pastures were overgrown.”
Friends invited her to their central Shenandoah Valley cabin to do some plein air painting. “I fell in love with the landscape,” she says. “It is far more open than that in New England, and the sycamore trees with their luminous, white bark dominate the pastures. I returned several times during the fall and winter of 2020-21. During the winter I do my plein air painting from my car (the panel is balanced on the steering wheel and my palette is to my right on the passenger seat.) In order to paint the streams I loved, I had to find unobstructed views from bridges where I could park without disrupting traffic."
Welcome Bethann Parker!
"Guided by intuition and curiosity, Parker utilizes ruggedly tactile paint to build up layers that depict her conscious and unconscious memories." - excerpt from Almanac, Parker's first solo exhibition with Gross McCleaf Gallery
Bethann Parker (b. 1984) runs a homestead in the mountains of northeast Appalachia that is rooted in traditional living. There, she tends a studio practice with interdisciplinary research and material experimentation provided by the land. Parker considers herself a midwife to the myriad forms and formats of her art.
She received a BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a Certificate from the Barnes Foundation. She was the recipient of The Fred and Naomi Hazel Art Scholarship, The Richard Von. Hess Travel Scholarship and twice awarded Venture Fund Grant for large project proposals. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and the Voice of America.
“I love to paint in the presence of a sitter or in the light of a cityscape, but I can’t “capture” the appearance; rather, I move the paint around, simplify, blur, scrape, and rephrase until the beloved seems to appear…. The vocation of art begins in a longing that only the art can address. At first, the longing attaches to something in the world. But, over time, the artist notices something about how picturing itself causes almost anything seen to open as an occasion for wonder and surprise.”
- Scott Noel
In his eleventh solo exhibition at Gross McCleaf, Scott Noel presents an impressive selection of monumental, narrative paintings...
If Ying Li’s paint application suggests a furious restlessness, her work has been, for many years, no less unsettled in terms of geography. Over the years, the artist’s motifs have included landscapes in France, Spain, Ireland, Italy, and Switzerland, and – on this side of the Atlantic – Newfoundland, Maine, the Colorado Rockies, and upstate New York, as well as New York City.
What to do when a pandemic freezes travel world-wide?
