The Creative Spark

NOVEMBER 20th  - DECEMBER 3

The Creative Spark opens at Meyer Gallery on November 20th, bringing together twenty-four artists who treat art history as raw material rather than a rulebook. Curators Natalie Featherston and Anthony Waichulis built the show around a simple conviction: technical mastery and tradition are the foundation of originality, not a limit on it. Every artist here has studied the old methods closely enough to know what to keep and what to break. The result is work that carries centuries of craft forward into subjects and sensibilities entirely of this moment. This is not a nostalgia show. It is proof that the past keeps generating new art, as long as someone is willing to wrestle with it.

CURRENT CATALOG

Francis Livingston has been painting the western landscape for more than four decades, and this new body of work reflects that experience. Livingston paints from memory, returning to a scene until the essential shapes and colors remain. He leaves room for the viewer to fill in the rest.

That approach carries through the exhibition. One painting follows a string of horses down a sagebrush hillside, low mountains in the distance. Another shows a cottonwood in full autumn color, red and yellow against a blue sky, with two horses grazing beneath it. A third places a rider on horseback in a stand of winter aspens, the snow reflecting the surrounding color. Each has been worked and reworked from memory until it holds up as a painting.

The work will be on view through September 3  

Artist Reception to meet Francis 

Friday, August 21, from 4 - 6 pm. 

UPCOMING SOLO EXHIBITION

Douglas Fryer: Echoes

Fryer lives and works in Spring City, Utah, surrounded by the agricultural terrain of the Sanpete Valley. That familiarity informs everything here, though Echoes presses it toward something quieter than documentation. He has spoken of seeking subjects with beauty and an edge, something complex and a little harsh, as present in the corner of a hayfield as in any grand vista. In this exhibition, that sensibility has grown more interior. The sensation of time passing through a place, of images altered by memory, gives the work its particular pressure.

Echoes is on veiw September 11 - 24. 

Artist Reception to meet Douglas on Friday September 11, from 4 - 6 pm.