Summer Bays - The Gallery View

October 17, 2015 Monica Chau

Borestone, Looking North in October, 48x60

Exhibiting ones work offers surprises and rewards. Summer Bays opened at Elizabeth Moss Gallery on October 8. As I entered the gallery for the opening of the show, my large Borestone Mountain painting greeted and surprised me. Borestone 2 hung in the smaller adjacent gallery, contrasting with the cool hues of the summer coastal images. Both of these works with their warmer palette and larger scale, although not part of my current series, let me see the new work in a different light.

Double Beaches and Hicks Creek

One of the highlights of a show is seeing the work hanging together in a clean, well lit space. There are also new contexts that result from a different arrangement hung by an objective third party. The placement and rhythm of work on the gallery wall, creates new relationships that I may not have previously seen. I like the sequence and the movement between these familiar pieces.

Varied views of Great Spruce Head Island and Addison, Maine

Penobscot Bay from the South Meadow, 18x72, oil

Wahoa Bay and Marsh Island, Addison

Three morning kayak paintings from Great Spruce Head Island

As is always the case, once the paintings are up on the wall, they have been liberated from my painting process. They now exist on their own, paintings that I have made. I think about them in the past tense. It's a very strange feeling to know that while I was working on THAT PAINTING, it was all that occupied my mind, perhaps obsessively for days at a time, and now I have let it go. I stand back to see the paintings as they are now. I will never be completely objective about them, but with passing time, I will see them differently.

Four views Great Spruce Head Island

Dawn, Great Spruce Head Island, 24x30, oil