landscape – MATTHEWS GALLERY BLOG

WIDENING THE HORIZON: Pictures and Paintings

June 18, 2015 Matthews Gallery1 Comment

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about a painting? For our exhibition WIDENING THE HORIZON: New Mexico Landscapes, we paired Southwestern landscape paintings with photographs of the places that inspired them. The results are fascinating, showing how artists interpret a setting based on style, sensibility and—particularly—sentiment. Explore the pairings below, and make sure to visit WIDENING THE HORIZON before it closes on June 30.

A glimpse of Middle Truchas Peak from Eli Levin‘s studio in Dixon, New Mexico.

This Alfred Morang painting may show artist Olive Rush’s garden on Canyon Road. Rush and Morang were close friends. Compare to the photograph at right.

Alice Webb‘s monotype of the iconic San Francisco de Assisi Mission Church in Taos, New Mexico gives us a sense of the surrounding landscape.

Eli Levin‘s interpretation of Abiquiu’s colorful rock formations.

Dorothy Morang paints a Santa Fe summer storm in watercolor.

Maynard Dixon‘s pastel of New Mexico’s dramatic cloud formations.

Mt. Carmel, Utah, according to Santa Fe artist Arthur Haddock.

Tommy Macaione brings out the purple and blue tones of a snowy Santa Fe street.

Barbara Brock‘s monotype of a Taos sunset.

Click here to learn more about WIDENING THE HORIZON: New Mexico Landscapes, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for daily gallery news.

SHOOTING SPARKS: Frank Morbillo’s Elemental Process

January 1, 2014January 7, 2014 Matthews Gallery1 Comment

Frank Morbillo sanding his sculpture Sprung

As we learned in his NEW HORIZONS show, sculptor Frank Morbillo is inspired by the way the elements carve the canyon lands of the American West. It’s fitting that his process is just as elemental. He bends and twists flat pieces of steel and bronze and then welds them into seamless three-dimensional forms, first creating smaller studies and working up to towering sculptures that possess the same gravitas as the rock formations he loves.

Witness the fiery birth of Frank’s sculpture Sprung and read quotes from the artist about his process and influences in this photo montage:

Fitting fabrication

“When you’re working with steel, you can work pretty inexpensively to generate an idea and get proportions down, and then make it a little bit bigger. Eventually this can go to the scale of the piece outside the Matthews Gallery.”

TIG welding

“My background was in ceramics when I first started. For two years of college I thought my major was going to be ceramics, but in my sophomore year I took a blacksmithing class on forging and fabricating metal. I was like, ‘You can heat the stuff up and move it like clay? Oh my God!’”

Welding

“You knock a piece of clay off the table and it breaks on the floor. You knock a piece of metal off and it dents the floor.”

Fine sanding

“A lot of the pieces come from hiking canyons and experiencing the paths that you take in a canyon. If you look at a topo of a canyon, you can see its meandering course. When you’re down in a canyon and you see how it’s been eroded and shaped by water and wind, it takes on another shape.”

Patina

“When I was in the foundry business doing patina work for different artists, we always used to talk about the translucency of bronze. They always wanted that, to where if you put this really nice golden brown patina over metal, you could see the metal coming through.”

Almost there…

“One of the nice things about being out in nature is that all of the things we connect ourselves with are gone. Where does that take you? I think we need to do that still in our lives.”

See Frank’s finished sculpture here and learn more about the Tesuque sculptor on our Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest pages.

NEW HORIZONS: Landscape Art Speaks

October 19, 2013 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

For our NEW HORIZONS: Focus on Landscapes show, running now through October 27, Tesuque sculptor Frank Morbillo‘s latest body of work engages with our diverse collection of contemporary landscape art. Throughout the exhibition, you’ll find observations by Morbillo and seven other artists, many of whom are inspired by the same severe desert expanses and infinite skies. Below is a selection of works and quotes from the show:

PATTERN

Frank Morbillo finds patterns wherever he looks in the natural world.
Kate Rivers uses manufactured patterns to form fractured reflections of nature.

“What’s a pattern? Something that might be predictable. When I observe things, that’s what I see. As an artist, you take all of these different things and see how they work together.”

-Frank Morbillo

“I’m using this history of text and image as something that is beautiful, and weaving the words together.”

-Kate Rivers

RHYTHM

David Grossmann abstracts his landscapes to lay bare underlying rhythms.
Frank Morbillo traces the formation and disruption of natural rhythms.

“My paintings… are simplified rhythms of color, light, and shape. On the surface they are quiet whispers, but I hope that they convey a depth of emotion to anyone who takes the time to stop and listen.”

-David Grossmann

“Entropy is the introduction of chaos and disorder. That’s a root of what I’ve done over the years. You take something that could be highly organized, and understand that everything, all things, are subject to entropy. As much as we feel like we’ve created something that defies that, there’s no chance. Everything is subject to it.”

-Frank Morbillo

TEXTURE

Terry Craig blends materials to mimic natural textures.
Frank Morbillo places materials with contrasting textures side-by-side.

“It took a long time… to develop the formulas and get the materials to do what I wanted them to do. You can scrape into it and get all sorts of these wonderful organic qualities.”
-Terry Craig

“Glass is a beautiful material that sets up this nice contrast with the metal. If you add texture to it, it takes on a different color. The light behaves differently going through it.”
-Frank Morbillo

COLOR

Jamie Chase uses multiple layers of paint to reveal and obscure different hues.
Frank Morbillo relies on the properties of glass to enhance his palette.

“There are so many narratives underneath the final painting. It starts out as something really dark or really dramatic in contrasting colors, and by the end it’s almost neutral colors, but there’s something moving under the surface.”
-Jamie Chase

“The glass introduced color into the work that really isn’t achievable in metal. The cobalt blues and reds and ambers have a quality that you can’t get with any of the metals.”
-Frank Morbillo

See NEW HORIZONS: Focus on Landscapes now through October 27 at Matthews Gallery. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to see more material from the show.