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Email PageTrasimeno
October 11, 2007- November 10, 2007
Reception: October 11, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Stephen Pentak
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
529 W 20th StKathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce the fourth solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Stephen Pentak. Trasimeno presents a new body of work in which the artist extends his dialogue between abstraction and representation in landscape painting away from the familiar shores of North America to the 2007 spring of Italy’s Tuscan and Umbrian landscape.
The seven paintings in this exhibition are based on study drawings, paintings on paper, and photographs taken from moving trains of Cortona, Italy. Pentak’s observations are both from afar and close at hand, as the artist’s terrace overlooked the Valdichiana, and he often walked the shores of nearby Lake Trasimeno. Pentak’s distant views avoid the romance often associated with this landscape in preference for an emphasis on light, atmosphere and color. Italy’s ubiquitous and naturally beautiful scenes of rooftops, villas and olive groves are sacrificed for atmospheric emphasis. The newly emerging green fields and trees of the Valdichiana are bathed in smoke from burn off of olive groves. Fresh colors are cloaked in a milky haze akin to the cloudy green hue of Lake Trasimeno, and distort the view from the hill town like that of looking into a lake or limestone creek. The dominance of white in these paintings, and its naturally opaque quality, capture the region’s atmosphere and cloak the view to replace details with scattered light. “White is a veil that obscures desire and erases youth,” Pentak explains. The artist’s signature sweeping strokes, using drywall trowels, plastering tools and palette knives that in the past have echoed the gesture of a fly-fisherman casting his line, in these paintings now capture the blur of the Cortona landscape as seen from a moving train, while the distant vistas prompt the imagination and hold a sense of expectation.
Stephen Pentak received his BA from Union College in New York, and his MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 1978. He is a Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University where he was Professor and Associate Dean from 1983-2006. He is the recipient of four Ohio Arts Council Fellowships and is co-author of Color Basics and Design Basics (fourth and fifth editions) published by Wadsworth. He exhibits extensively throughout the United States, from California to New York, and internationally including Canada and Israel. His work is in numerous public and private collections including The Columbus Museum of Art and The Wexner Center. Stephen Pentak currently lives and works in Columbus, Ohio.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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