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April 30, 2008- May 24, 2008
Reception: May 3, 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Eliza Auth, Nancy Bea Miller
Sherry French Gallery
601 W 26th StTo look at a painting by Eliza Auth is to be transported. Auth does more than just paint a landscape, and she uses paint to make her canvases glow with a mood and a feeling that hits the viewer immediately. Her paintings are of nature, and yet Eliza Auth brings something incredibly human to every setting she depicts, whether it be a snow-covered plain, or a wind-swept sand dune.
Eliza Auth’s technique is so strong that one feels truly transported to the location of her images, and the viewer too responds to her paintings with the feelings, of bliss, of peace, of relaxation or calm, that the images so wonderfully evoke. “Memory is what drives my paintings,” says the artist, “and I am drawn to places that have a connection to my past.” Herein lies the secret to the powerful warmth of her Realist works. Bucolic as many of her scenes are on their own, it is the amount of herself that Auth invests in each work that gives it the extra power to keep the viewer staring, and bringing them with her to the place of her easel and her reflections.
The current collection includes her works from such a variety of locales as Maine’s Acadia National Park and New Jersey’s Island Beach National Seashore, and also the lesser known but equally evocative locations of her own Pennsylvania area. Her latest inspiration has been the moody floodplain of the Susquehanna River Valley with its rocky shores and undulating hills, and this show includes many of her most recent works.
Time and memory are both important themes in this show. Auth uses water in many of her paintings to symbolize nostalgia, contemplation and reflection. The artist grew up on the water. “My parents were avid sailors and they taught me to pay attention to the weather and to read the changes in the light and the surface of the water.” When she moved to Philadelphia, she began to paint waterscapes because she missed living by the ocean. The process of painting water was a way of reliving the hours spent looking out over the ocean.
As Jean-Francois Millet has said, “It is treating the commonplace with the feelings of the sublime that gives art its true power.” Eliza Auth so readily sees the sublime in her surrounding scenery, and her art is indeed testimony to this assertion of Millet’s. “All of nature, no matter how insignificant, is worth contemplating,” Auth asserts, and with her work, she makes that contemplation irresistible.
“Memory and Meaning” is about taking the time to see the significance of the everyday, from babbling brooks to picturesque hilltops, a viewpoint which can sustain and enrich our lives.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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