FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Ted Walsh: If Memory Serves
On View: October 23 - November 28, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 24, 1-4 PM
Gross McCleaf Gallery, The Mill Studios, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA, 19127
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present If Memory Serves, a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Ted Walsh. Rooted in the American realist tradition, Walsh’s paintings and drawings draw on a lifelong fascination with buildings, landscapes, familiar objects, and the stories they might hold. From childhood, he has enjoyed imagining the spaces inside buildings, turning them around in his mind and considering what might exist beyond their visible exteriors. That curiosity extends throughout his work, where familiar subjects can take on an uneasy, sometimes humorous quality.
Walsh considers his subjects both as recognizable objects and as shapes within a painting, paying close attention to their scale, placement, and relationships to one another. As he explains, “The physical character of the work is equally important to me. I build, scrape, sand, draw into, and repaint surfaces until they have the quality I’m looking for.”
In If Memory Serves, buildings and landscapes frequently suggest places with histories extending beyond the moment depicted. In a recent conversation with Elizabeth Johnson for Art Sync, Walsh describes his fascination with imagining the spaces inside buildings: “I like to turn buildings around in my head: What does that space look like in plan, or cross section, or from another angle?” In paintings such as Daydream House and A Place to Wait, this curiosity informs scenes that feel both recognizable and invented, inviting viewers to imagine what might exist beyond the visible structures.
The construction of the painted surface is equally central to Walsh's work. Layers of paint, changes in opacity, and variations in texture contribute to the visual complexity of his compositions. In Delivered, for example, butterflies appear at the extreme foreground of the painting, introducing another layer to the image. Walsh compares these small elements to “sprinkles thrown in at different points to flavor the recipe,” describing how windows, birds, fence posts, and other details can serve a similar purpose throughout his work.
Walsh is particularly interested in the accumulated character of ordinary places. Discussing A Place to Wait, he explains, “I like the idea of little vernacular spaces formed over a long time.” Details such as a heating oil tank, a chimney, or a window become important parts of the composition, suggesting the passage of time and the ways buildings are adapted and inhabited.
Ultimately, Walsh leaves the meaning of his paintings open to the viewer. As he writes in his artist statement, “I believe paintings are objects which tell their own stories. It is important to me that viewers see my work in whatever way they find most useful.”
About the Artist
Ted Walsh is an artist based in southern New Jersey. For more than two decades, he has exhibited throughout the United States, and his work is held in private collections in the United States and abroad. He earned his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Walsh has received two Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grants and First Prize in Painting at Art of the State at The State Museum of Pennsylvania. He has twice served as artist-in-residence at Gettysburg National Military Park and was selected as the inaugural artist-in-residence at First State National Historical Park. He has also been an artist-in-residence at Rocky Neck Art Colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
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Lisa S. Roberts: Quiet Home
On View: October 23 - November 28, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 24, 1-4 PM
Gross McCleaf Gallery, The Mill Studios, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA, 19127
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Quiet Home, a solo exhibition of new cut paper collages by Lisa S. Roberts. Originally trained as an architect, Roberts spent more than three decades working in graphic and product design, creating designs for home furnishings, textiles, and everyday objects. Throughout her career, her fascination with color and architectural space led her to develop a distinctive practice in cut-paper collage.
In Quiet Home, Roberts turns her attention to domestic interiors and the objects that give them character. Books, furniture, artwork, flowers, and a familiar black cat populate colorful, carefully constructed spaces. Through these arrangements, Roberts explores the personality of a home and the ways in which everyday objects can suggest the lives of those who inhabit it. Working with surgical scissors, an X-ACTO knife, and hundreds of sheets of colored paper, Lisa constructs intricate compositions one layer at a time.
Roberts states, “Color has always been the engine of my work.” She frequently intensifies or changes the colors of her source interiors, using unexpected combinations to establish relationships between objects and define the atmosphere of a room. In her artist statement, she describes her unusually visceral response to color as a possible form of synesthesia: “When a palette comes together, I actually feel it—a small electric jolt, a physical sense that the colors are right.”
Her architectural training also informs the way she constructs space through overlapping shapes and layers of paper. The subtle shadows between these layers introduce depth and texture while revealing the physical construction of each collage. As Roberts explains, “Architecture taught me to understand space three-dimensionally: to see how forms relate to one another, how planes overlap, and how perspective and proportion create a sense of depth.”
Among the recurring elements in Quiet Home is a black cat, whose presence introduces a playful narrative dimension to Roberts' interiors. What began as an experiment in earlier exhibitions has become a recognizable character in her work. Roberts observes that an otherwise unoccupied room takes on a different meaning when a living creature enters it: “…the moment you put a living creature into that room you create a narrative.” The cat invites viewers to consider who inhabits these spaces, what might be happening beyond the picture, and the relationship between the room and its unseen occupants.
For Roberts, these interiors reflect the personal choices through which people make a space their own. As she writes in her artist statement, “These interiors are quiet spaces. They are rooms meant for reading, looking, thinking, gathering, or simply being.”
About the Artist
Originally trained as an architect, Lisa S. Roberts found a greater passion for graphic and product design. Over three decades, she designed in the gift and home furnishing markets for more than 50 diverse manufacturers. Her designs were applied to dinnerware, textiles, paper tableware, clocks, watches, wrapping paper, greeting cards, and many more.
She also created meticulous cut paper collages of architecture and interiors that were reproduced onto notecards and branded products for museum stores and hotels. Private clients commissioned her to create portraits of their homes.
Intermittently, Lisa took breaks from designing and wrote four books about contemporary product design: Antiques of the Future, DesignPOP, Mr. Waffles Loves Design, and What is Good Design: A simple question without a simple answer. She was also featured in a TV docu-series titled, “My Design Life.”
In 2020, during the pandemic, Lisa’s work changed direction again. She let go of the constraints of product and architecture, and evolved into abstract art. With her love of color and working in cut paper, she found respite in abstraction. She loved the ‘high’ she got when putting just the right colors together and then letting them tell her where to go.
When not sitting at her work table with papers, surgical scissors and double-stick tape, Lisa sits on the boards of the Philadelphia Art Museum, Collab, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Poor Richard’s Charitable Trust.
Ted Walsh, Dormant, Oil on paper, 30" x 22"
Lisa S. Roberts, He Thought He Was Alone, Cut paper collage, 23" x 16"