Bolinas – 38 x 50 – oil on linen.On View: May 7 – May 30, 2021
Sheila Blake is a representational modernist, a colorist, whose paintings of houses, yards and objects convey a feeling both elegiac and disturbing — of realism pushed to an imaginary limit. In Bolinas she depicts a house and a life left long in the past. In this and her other large paintings there is a sense of near and far struggling with each other, of subtly shifting perspective; in Scotty of a hammock uncannily suspended, moving toward us. Her masterful pastels like Ironing and Still Life With Pink Telephone combine bravura drawing and color to convey a Hopper-like yearning.
Blake is part of a tradition, she says, in which “painting aspires to poetry: a fully realized world constructed from abstract and seen elements – which always discloses itself as paint. There must be strangeness – strangeness as beauty arisen from contact with a different kind of consciousness, with motion, depth, openness, rhythm, and color. I want the viewer to be able to open up and enter a strange cosmos.”
Gallery Hours:
- Friday, Saturday, Sunday 1 – 7.
- To visit other days please contact us at info@foundrygallery.org or 301-452-4005.
Foundry Gallery is located at 2008 – 8th Street NW.
