A vivid orange house sits on a street as its reflection glistens in a large puddle on a concrete road in the Jim Mott painting “Wet Street, Corn Hill.” Lush greenery flanks the house and casts its green tint onto the puddle. In the foreground of the small canvas is a black and white “one-way street” sign hanging from a telephone pole.
“Wet Street, Corn Hill” is part of Mott’s Itinerant Artists Project, a set of small oil paintings that Mott has created on his annual, month-long travels around the country observing country landscapes. Itinerant Artists Project is one of several series of artworks currently on display in the Gelb Gallery in a new exhibit entitled “A Sense of Place: Connecting with Nature.” The exhibition also features artwork by Jonathon Nix and Gar Waterman, two other visual artists. Mott and Nix delivered a gallery talk about their works in the exhibition last Tuesday.
Also in the show is Mott’s watercolor painting “Norton Street Houses, Morning Light.” The painting, which is dominated by a blue, gray and black color palette interrupted by the bright red of a stop sign, shows three nearly identical houses on a snowy morning.
This piece only took Mott 40 minutes to paint, a personal record.
“[This piece was painted] when I was staying at someone’s house, but I saw that scene [as I was leaving and] thought, ‘Oh no, I’d just done eight paintings in three days and I was burned out.’ But I gave myself 40 minutes to do it, and it worked.… With painting, if you can get to the state of just working way ahead of your thoughts, on reflex, sometimes really good things happen,” said Mott during the gallery talk.
A series of Nix’s paintings, titled “Arboreal Figures,” is also on exhibit. This series consists of black-and-white sketches of various trees in the New England area. Though he was originally more focused on painting and drawing people and figures, Nix was inspired by his son to begin sketching trees. This exploration led to a full black-and-white series of trees.
“I looked around a lot [for trees when I started], and I still look around. This has given me this reflex to cultivate this standing on the world. Once the leaves come down, I’m scouting for subjects…. They aren’t random trees. They’re chosen for their form — their abstract qualities,” said Nix during the gallery talk.
In one of his sketches, Nix, who is the husband of Andrea Nix, Director of Finance and Assistant Treasurer at Andover, depicts a tree on Andover’s Great Lawn. The tree dominates the page, as its branches extend to the edge of the paper. The small size of the Armillary Sphere in the background adds to the tree’s overpowering presence.
“One of my favorite things is that [the sketch] is pretty much solely the tree in the picture even though… there is background behind a lot of these trees,” said Ashley Scott ’16, an audience member of the gallery talk. “He focuses our perspective. Rather than seeing the tree as part of the background, we’re seeing the tree as the subject.”
Five of sculptor Waterman’s works are in the show. Each of the pieces, made out of onyx and/or marble, is in the shape of a nudibranch, a bright, soft-shelled mollusk. For Waterman, the many shapes and colors that nudibranchs come in offer an array of forms to sculpt. One of the nudibranch sculptures in the exhibit is shimmering orange and white with a large flower-like shape on its wavy body.
Waterman will be visiting campus in January to meet with both art and biology classes.
“The art department strives to show work that will be of interest to the [Andover] community, has potential for interdisciplinary activities and that can function as a teaching resource in the Art Department and hopefully in other departments as well… [Waterman’s] work not only has aesthetic appeal but is also part of a genre of art with an environmental message and also intersects with the biology curriculum,” said Therese Zemlin, Instructor and Chair in Art.
“A Sense of Place: Connecting with Nature” is on display until January 30, 2015.
