Marcia Clark :
From the Aegean to the Arctic: Recent Paintings
October 5-30, 2021
Reception: Thursday, October 7 from 6-8PM
Artist Talk: Saturday, October 30 at 2:30PM
Artist present on Saturdays.
Paintings inspired by travels from the Aegean to the Arctic will be on view in Marcia Clark’s exhibition at Blue Mountain Gallery, now located on 27th Street.
“The places I have been visiting are rocky and arid, coastal communities that emerge at the edge of vibrant seas with topographies that offer uninterrupted panoramic vistas. They are very different in climate and culture though I believe a relationship can be seen in the views and layered textures in the paintings, whether they are about cliffs in the Aegean or the Arctic ice.
The Island of Santorini takes a prominent place in this exhibition. I’ve focused on cliffs at the edge of a caldera that, millennia ago, sank under the sea along with half the island, the result of a catastrophic volcanic eruption. The way the architecture belongs to its natural setting is also significant to me. The buildings seem ageless as they tend to be freshly whitewashed whether ancient or newly built, and they both define and meld into the rocky landscape. Some pieces done after I returned were painted over map transfers on canvas. In these, remnants of the maps show through, adding their own texture and a footnote to the layering of time that I witnessed.”
Two artist residencies facilitated travel to the Mediterranean while recent reports about subjects painted earlier, in Alaska and Greenland have compelled Clark to consider these subjects again, noting differences wrought by a changing climate. The residencies were at Lakkos, in Heraklion, Crete and ACI, in Corciano, Umbria. Marcia Clark has exhibited at venues that include the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Museum of the City of New York, the Hudson River Museum, and Albany Institute of History and Art as well as venues in Canada, Greenland, and Iceland. She was a recipient of the Childe Hassam Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Artist in Residence grant, and has written for Smithsonian Magazine, retracing travels of Thomas Cole, first of the Hudson River School painters. Clark has a BFA degree in painting from Yale University and a MFA degree from SUNY New Paltz. She is Artist/Director at Blue Mountain Gallery, and her work is shown regularly at Longyear Gallery in Margaretville, NY.
