Lowell, MA - Curated by Setheyny Pen, Seeing in Color focuses on color exploration with innovative techniques and through a range of individual expression and symbolism. Created by five artists, they wrap around the walls of the gallery to create a mesmerizing and electric atmosphere. The artists in Seeing in Color use color explicitly to achieve very different ends. Their paintings vary in temperament from animated to somber. Their surfaces range from thin glazes to thick impastos.
Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda 's paintings are clever, intriguing, and keen to communicate. They investigate the painting surface and the relationships of the figure to color and pattern environments. Catalina Viejo'sletter series uses colored squares in the place of letters to evoke a rhythm and pulse that suggests the ideas found in written language. In her portraits, the figure's gaze draws the viewer into their own world of color. The objects and patterns surrounding the figures create a dream-like environment filled with symbols that reflect the individual's identity.
Diane Ayott's paintings use the contemporary language of abstraction. Organic in their complexity, formal concerns are critical to ayott's paintings and works on paper. Combining layered markings - dots, dashes, lines, slashes, circles, ovals and loops, she creates color shifts and spatial patterns. Ayott rolls, scrapes, brushes and squeezes paint into the various layers to create skins of color and accrued layers of information. As the colors intensify, so does the spatial depth.
Kellie Weeks' rich encaustic paintings are bright yet moody. Through her encaustics she translates the complexity of human emotions onto the canvas. Week's art is fueled by past and present relationships. Using both oil and encaustic as vehicles to display personal sentiments, she creates shapes that are sometimes incomplete, interrupted; yielding or competing for space. Her subtle arrangements of strong, saturated colors reveal her bold intentions and subdued reactions.
Mary Bucci McCoy's paintings at first glance appear minimal and simple. Upon further observation, the viewer discovers the subtle nuances in McCoy's painting-- the differences in brush strokes, in the paint, and in her delicate variations in color and texture. These subtleties engage the viewer in a range of dialogues. Their 3-D aspects and sleek colors create a play of planes on the surface of her panels. Her compositions are carefully balanced by her precise selection of color and placement of her marks.
Rose Olson's paintings reveal their intensity through muted stripes of color that shift and shimmer as the viewer scans them. Olson's recent paintings are quiet until the viewer moves, or the light changes. Olson paints on wood because she likes the smooth, hard surface. Her transparent layers of color, allow one see the wood grain beneath. The formal properties of the square shape and horizontal banding are contradicted by the organic nature of the wood panel, the artist's brush marks and by the irregularity of her hand evident in the vertical and horizontal veils of color.
The artists in Seeing in Color exhibit extensively. Their works have been seen in Boston, Cambridge, on the North Shore, throughout New England and in New York.
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