Les Yeux Du MondE
June 8 – August 11, 2019
Les Yeux du Monde’s summer show, Landscape Reimagined will feature 27 painters and 10 sculptors who take landscape as their subject or use their art to literally inhabit and intersect with nature. The show was inspired by the concurrent exhibition, Lady Painters at Second Street Gallery which examines the influence of Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell on contemporary artists Isabelle Abbot, Karen Blair, Janet Bruce, Molly Herman and Priscilla Whitlock. Landscape Reimagined will include work by those artists as well as others who paint in the expressionist mode such as Michelle Gagliano, Ellen Hathaway and Gwyn Kohr, along with veteran Ann Lyne and Dorothy Robinson. It will also include Mary Page Evans, a direct link to Mitchell, who knew Mitchell in the South of France in her later years. Mitchell admired Evans so much that she gave her a painting and hung one of Evans’ in her own bedroom. On the other end of the spectrum in terms of style, the show will feature some who paint landscape more precisely or realisticailly such as Elizabeth Bradford, Laura Wooten, and Richard Crozier. Crozier’s paintings often bear witness to the slow destruction of landscape for development. Several artists use landscape as inspiration for explorations in other media, as Kathy Kuhlmann does in her plastic bag paintings and Ana Rendich does in resin. Two newcomers to LYDM but not to the national or international art scene—John Beerman and William Dunlap—will present the theme in their more surreal and conceptual modes. The show will also feature sculpture inserted literally into the landscape around the grounds of Les Yeux du Monde by ten sculptors who work in central Virginia, New Mexico, Oregon and New York. These works, in media ranging from steel to concrete, stone, styrofoam, wood and more, along with the art inside the gallery will encourage us to honor and celebrate this living earth we all call home in a time of increasing peril to its natural resources. It is hoped that our meditations on the landscape will lead us to see our important role as stewards of our environment instead of reckless exploiters of it.