March 8 – April 19, 2024
Friday, March 15, 6-9pm: Opening Reception & SLC Gallery Stroll
Friday, April 19, 6-9pm: SLC Gallery Stroll
- Downy Doxey-Marshall
- Bloom
Each spring, blossoming trees announce the Earth's renewal. I am inspired by their beauty. My paintings are a celebration of spring, where the blossoms diffuse the urban landscape and uplift our spirits with the promise of renewal and hope.
From a distance, my paintings exude a captivating realism that beckons you closer. As you approach, the image transforms, unveiling the intricate layers of my oil painting process—drips from turpentine-stained canvases, luscious, variegated colors applied like frosting with palette knives. This process demands immense restraint to preserve the delicate balance of my marks, mirroring the delicate yet powerful spirit of spring.
- Laura Sharp Wilson
- Gilding the Lily: A Choreography
Gilding the Lily: A Choreography explores the experience of growing up in a rural patch of New Jersey in the 1970’s. For the past three decades I have been creating botanical imagery. It is only recently that I view my motivation for making this work in a different light.
When I was a child, my mother rented an apartment in the top floor of a carriage house. The carriage house was located on the grounds of an old 125-acre estate along the Hudson River called “Rio Vista”. Other families rented the various buildings including the dairy, the garage and housing for workers. There was only a gravel road, so traffic was minimal. There were a lot of other kids, woods, dogs, and bikes.
I spent quite a bit of time in the woods, mostly solo, creating forts, tents, a lean to and a giant weaving suspended from a large tree branch. It has occurred to me that I was in dialogue with nature as a child. The grass, dirt, sky, horse chestnuts, skunk cabbage, trees, rocks were my tools and a springboard for a creative life.
This childhood practice informed the abstracted botanical language I have developed over the past 40 years. My penchant for making fantastical floral, vine, leaf, tree, and log imagery illustrates the distance most humans currently have with the natural world. By inventing and fabricating an alternate natural world I am emphasizing my alienation from wilderness.
