Unwritten Thoughts

David Dunlop New England Atmosphere 12 x 22 oil on aluminum
David Dunlop, New England Atmosphere, oil on aluminum, 12 x 22″.

Art 3 Gallery presents three exhibitions per year showing a wide sampling of their artists. There are recurring themes among a number of the exhibiting artists in Unwritten Thoughts with several dedicated to landscape images along with figurative painting and sculpture. Certain of the artists present a range of varying interests within their own work. Dustan Knights’ Ode to Birches is an abstract painting, delivered with an aggressive hand, of grays and whites that evokes the peeling bark of birches. A small, similarly colored painting, Old House, subdues gesture within a quiet, cubist space. Pat Gerkin has a series of small, muted encaustic works with a meditative solemnity, while her larger, bright red oil, Hidden From View #12, incorporates an array of code-like forms drifting and pulsing like fragmented ideas in a heated fluidity.

Gary Zack’s paintings have a shaved down sparseness that nearly denies representation. Pueblo carries an earthy echo of southwest color in an elemental field of raw brushwork. His larger Collection is a nervous, jittery arranging of plant forms that are in the same process of becoming pure painting with layered surfaces of drawn strokes traveling across thin atmospheric layers of color.

Summer on the Marsh by Susan Bailey gently recalls Rockwell Kent’s reductive picturing of the observed landscape imbued with lasting weight. In contrast, David Dunlop’s New England Atmosphere, a tall earth green and pale blue study of foregrounded milkweeds set against receding fog, reveals a damp wildness within a deceptively benign landscape.

Lincoln Perry is a figurative painter whose images carry an engrossing narrative mission. Sewing presents three individuals in a brightly windowed room. Two are women seated on the floor; one of them working with a colorful fabric, while the other women, head resting on her elbow, observes. The third figure is a male seated behind and above the women, his head down, his attention less specified. The painting is whisperingly sad, still and visually loaded. Through the windows Perry frames a pale view of neighboring houses and trees, directing the eye to the mystery of the ordinary.