New Art Exhibit Portraits of the Sky Set to Open at Western
Western Wyoming Community College’s (Western’s) Art Gallery is pleased to present Portraits of the Sky, an exhibition of landscape paintings by Erin Spencer to the community in March. The show will run from March 3 to April 16, 2023. Visitors will be able to visit the exhibition daily from 8 AM to 10 PM except for holiday closures.
Erin Spencer is a Rhode Island-based artist who has spent the last 15 years exploring the landscape in her art. In her words, the landscape is a “Well of inspiration [that] never runs dry.” Her explorations of the landscape have taken her around the country and to Europe, from California to New England, and from England to France and the Netherlands. Her paintings are included in private collections around the world including across the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, and Japan.
Erin Spencer’s approach to the landscape finds its artistic antecedents in notable American landscape painters such as George Inness (1825-1894), William Lathrop (1859-1928), Edward Redfield (1869-1965), and even more recently, Stuart Shils (b.1954). Her work is an intermeshing of deeply illusionistic atmosphere and space with rich, inventive color schemes, lyrical mark-making, and an unerring sense of design. “My style tends to be impressionistic and responsive,” said the artist. “I seek to distill the elements of the landscape to their simplest forms, looking for a balance between representation, abstract mark-making, and emotional gesture.” In this way, her work marries contemporary painterly concerns with America’s long and storied tradition of depicting the landscape.
The work included in this exhibition will focus on the poetic possibilities inherent in painting the sky. “As I began to map out the paintings I wanted to create for this show,” said Spencer, “I knew I wanted to paint the sky. I paint with the philosophy that clouds, movement, and color in the sky are more than an afterthought in a painting. They breathe emotion and life into a piece. While most elements in a landscape painting are static, clouds and atmosphere are constantly moving and changing shape. Painting the light shifts and abstraction in the clouds allows for a lot of artistic choices. I love that. One of the things I am most drawn to when I look at original art is how I can feel the presence of the artist, like they could be just around the corner. Their choices and their marks are left in the paint. I hope you can feel that when you see these paintings.”
Erin Spencer will be giving an artist talk about the show, her process, and influences on April 13, 2023, at 6 PM in Western’s Art Gallery. Additionally, she will be conducting a landscape painting workshop on April 14 and 15. The workshop will be offered as a 1 credit class. Those interested in participating in the workshop will be able to register through Western Wyoming Community College.
If you would like to see more of Erin Spencer’s art, you may visit her website at https://www.erinspencerart.com/ or follow her Instagram account: @erinspencerart. If you have any questions about this show or the Art Gallery’s programing in general, please contact Jacob Muldowney at jmuldowney@westernewyoming.edu.