Rebekah Callaghan
"The more I paint, the more kinds of beauty I see in the world. Even driving home on the dreariest day looks more colorful after painting. I try to put these discoveries back into the work.”
- Rebekah Callaghan
Fountain, 35″ x 40″, Oil On Canvas
Gross McCleaf Gallery is thrilled to present Quiet Season, the latest exhibition by Rebekah Callaghan, featuring sensitive and color-rich abstractions that reflect her botanical inspirations. With Quiet Season, Callaghan debuts a muted, neutralized palette, a departure from the vibrant pink and green hues of her past shows, and invites viewers to explore the quiet magic and mystery within each hushed detail of her works.
For Callaghan, the act of painting is more than a daily habit or discipline; it’s a profound form of inquiry and a metaphorical touchstone. Her works explore formal elements of fine art, such as light, color, and shape, yet it is through initial drawings and studies that she gains a better understanding of spatial relationships. Callaghan explains, “I love when positive and negative forms reverse or share roles. These spaces are so intimately intertwined; in fact, they need each other. So, I want to give them equal responsibilities on the surface.” Significant attention is also paid to where individual elements meet and how their edges interact. Transparent ghost shapes remain from earlier iterations of the work, possessing just enough structure to let the surrounding shapes sing. These interactions take on personality, tone, and tenor, acting like visual corollaries to movements in a dance, lines in a poem, or instruments playing in an ensemble.
Having studied the violin growing up, Callaghan retains a strong sense of relativism when it comes to incorporating concepts such as a sense of time, sensory experiences, and even volume into her paintings. She notes, “I’ve been working with more muted tones in this body of work. I’m thinking about enhancing color by toning it down. It’s like lowering the volume in the car when it starts pouring rain so you can see better.” And while every detail of a painting matters and can be analyzed for its contribution to the greater whole, there is no idealized point of completion or end goal in Callaghan’s work. As she explains, ”...that’s really what it’s about: getting someplace I haven’t been before, arriving somewhere new.”
Callaghan looks to the works and wisdom of artists and instructors she has encountered through her years of practice and teaching, noting the poetic and often contradictory ways that artists talk about painting. Her late professor, Frank Bramblett, opined, “...what matters most is what we don’t know.” In the studio, the unknown draws Callaghan into new ways of handling paint and working with color relationships. The journey is filled with discovery, surprise and deliberate reflection leading to an open-ended moment of what she asserts as, “...arriving at a place that feels right.” For viewers of Callaghan's work, the unknown provides curiosity, delight, and an opportunity for slow observation and contemplation. The longer one looks, the more there is to behold in these beautiful paintings.
Image Right: Sleepy Sun, 14″ x 11″, Oil On Canvas
Rebekah Callaghan received an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University after her BFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She has had solo and group exhibitions in California and across the Mid-Atlantic region. Her works and interviews have been featured in Title Magazine, Two Coats of Paint and Art Journal. In 2020, Callaghan collaborated with Gorman Clothing, Australia to create a series of fabrics for a Gorman Clothing release of garments. She is represented by Maybaum Gallery in San Francisco and Gross McCleaf Gallery. Callaghan lives and works in Philadelphia.
Interlude II, 40″ x 30″, Oil On Canvas
~Exhibition Preview~
May 2 - 23, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 1 - 4 pm
