American Scenes

American Scenes

Timothy Barr | Randall Exon | T. Allen Lawson

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American Scenes Timothy Barr Randall Exon T. Allen Lawson May 7 - June 8, 2021

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: Timothy Barr, Moonlight Float, 2017, oil on panel, 19.25 x 17.88 inches

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American Scenes “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass In a new exhibition entitled American Scenes, three extraordinary artists present more than 30 exquisite representational paintings and drawings that capture and enshrine iconic values that have come to be associated with ideas of Americana. Their imagery in this show is both largely away from the urban and close to nostalgic memory. Their paintings radiate technical mastery and, not incidentally, quiet beauty even from the most quotidian of subjects. These artists, Timothy Barr, T. Allen Lawson, and Randall Exon, each present examples of scenes, figures and objects that embody the connection between man and nature. The works reflect their individual styles and personal aesthetics. W.ith this exhibition, LewAllen Galleries is pleased to welcome each of them to its roster of outstanding artists.

The works in this show depict subjects that stay in the mind and touch the heart. They resonate both with individual experience and memory, and more broadly, often with aspects of American virtues and values.

Throughout the history of art, paintings have often functioned as reliquaries to honor and preserve cultural values and memories of a people. Art can elevate imagery into totems of culture, associating favored subject matter with ideals of beauty and virtue.

Since the time of the Hudson River painters in the early 19th century, artists have chosen to convey the American landscape with a sense of reverence, spirituality, and personal reflection. Often considered visual analogs of the Transcendentalist literary and philosophical movement espoused at the same time by Thoreau, Emerson, and others, the Hudson River artists found evidence of the divine in everyday experience— and especially so in nature. In looking at many of the exquisite paintings in this American Scenes exhibition, one might discern a similar sense of spiritual beauty present in these remarkable scenes of lush forests, wintery plains, and in the classic architecture of small-town America.

Rather than following strictly what they observe to create mimetic likeness, each artist refracts the landscape through a distinct lens, exploring formal painting issues as well as those of personal or emotional consequence. These three artists convey highly individual portrayals of agrarian life, countryside vistas, mountains, forests, rivers, or seaside life, often interpreted through poetics of tone, light, and color. Many of these landscapes are of scenes that are partially imagined or personally significant. They gleam with a sheen of familiarity and romance that drives them beyond objective depiction: images of stone farmhouses, barns, shoreline architecture, and clapboard houses often glow with a mood of nostalgia and mystery.

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Timothy Barr, Doe Run Farm, 2018, oil on panel, 23.5 x 23.5 inches

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T. Allen Lawson, Hoar Frost, 2021, oil on linen over panel, 26 x 24 inches

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These quietly powerful works are contemporary iterations of the longstanding traditions of American landscape painting. Many confer a sense of the sublime, containing and preserving expressions of places in time that represent the best of America, and resonate ideals and virtues that will continue to serve as reminders of American values a hundred years from now. Within the imagery there are numerous signifiers of what we might generally regard as better parts of American civilization: the pastoral beauty of the American landscape, the meeting of man and nature as expressed in built stone structures, the Jeffersonian ideal of the “yeoman farmer,” the purity of simple rural life, the archetypal experience of the American Frontier, the rugged life by the sea, to describe but a few.

Though the range of images here is wide and the stylistic differences among the artists broad, there is a distinct commonality of subject matter based on the natural world. Each artist strives to capture the essences of beauty of the places they reside – Pennsylvania in the cases of Barr and Exon, and Maine and Wyoming in the case of Lawson. Though each artist converges direct observation with memories of more general experiences, there is notably evident in the work of all three a sense of well-considered contemplation, both as to subject and execution. In their paintings, there is a gleaning of moments in time that concentrates their power to activate memory and emotional resonance.

What emerges in their work is a pervasive feeling of quiet and serenity, especially welcome at a time when life for many seems a dystopian jumble of frenetic rush, confounding uncertainty and hardship. These paintings present vistas and images that celebrate aspects of the American experience, aspects that endure and offer comfort and hope that hardship can, and has been, transcended in the expanse of American history.

In various ways, these images offer symbols of the greatness of America, the beauty and cycles of renewal inherent in the natural world, and glimpses of hope in the face of adversity.

Different qualities of light play an important and contrapuntal role among the works in this exhibition. T. Allen Lawson skillfully implements a variety of mark-making techniques to translate for the viewer the ephemeral properties of landscape in his art. His use of light, whether diffused through falling snow or bathing a rocky hillside, captures the evocative poetics of light and shadow. His paintings convey a connection with ranch life – not luxurious, but a mythic life of solidity, individuality, and authenticity. These works have a dreamy feeling that lures the eye and mind into contemplation. They seem like invitations to a sense of wellbeing, a feeling that one might find comfort in the world Lawson’s works hint at, if only it were possible to climb into the scenes he presents.

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Timothy Barr achieves a level of clarity in his works that recalls the Luminist school of landscape painting, foregoing the sensory impressions of brushstroke in favor of stunning detail. Each blade of grass, inlaid brick, and variegated contour of a tree branch is rendered with hard-edged precision and a striking degree of lucidity. The results are tranquil images that convincingly express minute bits of verisimilitude with clean, radiant light. In numerous images, Barr’s work celebrates the glories of nature, its animal life, built structures anchored in their environment, and vegetation of many sorts, the latter two of which can in themselves attain a sculptural quality. His work conveys a clear sense of the spiritual nature of the connection between man and the earth. The pastoral sensibility of Barr’s work is also reminiscent of the Barbizon School.

In the works of Randall Exon, the atmosphere is far softer and thicker, sunlight seemingly diffused through a haze that imbues his imagery with the suggestive properties of dream, memory, or moments frozen in time.

This quality of Exon’s work is also reflected in a far more physical application of paint, his brushstrokes highly visible, often drawing the attention of the eye, and evoking the works of tonalist American artist George Innes. Exon’s use of light is extraordinary, adding a Luminist quality that becomes an active participant in each painting. The relationship of his figures to space is brilliant and he possesses a remarkable ability to heroicize the ordinary: the white clapboard garage and small shoreline house attain an aura of memorial for times past and the rugged lifestyle of inhabitants of these structures from the first half of the 20th century. His major painting, The Falls, with its depiction of a placid summer afternoon and suggesting the vitality of youth, is a classic example of naturalist style and might be compared to the works of Thomas Eakins.

Experience teaches that with a painting, not unlike with a poem, structure and content cannot really be separated. That lesson is illustrated in the remarkable work of these three American Scenes artists. The timeless qualities of each painter’s exquisite technique, composition, and fluency with light, color and brushwork are paralleled in every respect by the engaging effect of their subject matter. These aspects combine with the brilliant imaginations and clarity of aesthetic vision present here to create paintings that resist obsolescence and, instead, manifest a quality enabling them to endure across time: beauty. There is an inventive boundlessness of beauty in bare limbs of a silver maple tree in Barr’s Doe Run Farm, or laundry on a line in Exon’s Sheets and Garage, or a rock outcropping in Lawson’s Basalt Sentinel. In even the simplest of objects there can be greatness at the hand of artistic ability and creativity. It is the genius of these three artists that each of them have that hand.

Kenneth R Marvel

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Randall Exon, Sheets and Garage, 2006, oil on canvas, 24 x 34 inches

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T. Allen Lawson T. Allen Lawson’s paintings of mountains, plains, and small-town life accentuate the immaterial play of ephemeral light, shadow, and color. His paintings draw on his robust plein-air practice, which incorporates his observations of the landscape but bends them past literal depiction in his studio towards a quality of metaphor. Even though his paintings are borne through specific experiences in nature, as Lawson has said, “I am not drawn to nor inspired by subject alone.”

Instead, Lawson’s work gains a feeling of intimacy and timelessness from Lawson’s desire to capture on canvas the abstract, ephemeral qualities of nature.

Born in 1963 in Sheridan, Wyoming, Lawson attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago and later the Lyme Academy of Fine Art in Lyme, Connecticut. He was awarded the prestigious John F and Anna Lee Stacey Grant, The Red Smith Memorial Award at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, and the Jurors’ Choice Award from the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. He returned to Wyoming in 2016, where he continues to find inspiration for his work.

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Basalt Sentinel, 2019, oil on linen over panel, 32 x 34 inches

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Relic, 2015, graphite on paper, 30 x 30 inches

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November Sun, 2021, oil on linen over panel, 26 x 29.88 inches

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Randall Exon Randall Exon is a mid-career representational painter whose landscapes and figurative works are filled with dream-like mystery and pastoral beauty. They evoke an alluring sense of place and people, inspiring feelings of both nostalgia and wonder. His works allude to ordinary life while expressing a sense of the extraordinary.

Exon was born in South Dakota and raised in Kansas and Oregon. He received a BFA from Washburn University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. He has been teaching at Swarthmore College since 1982, and is today the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Professor of Art. He has earned him recognition as a Henry Luce Scholar, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Prize from the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Thomas Benedict Clark Prize at the 179th Annual Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, National Academy Museum of Fine Arts in New York.

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The Falls, 2012, oil on linen, 68 x 68 inches

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Hunter, 2008, oil on panel, 16.25 x 16 inches

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Boy with Striped Bass, 2011, oil on canvas on panel, 14 x 23.75 inches

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Beach House Window, 2006, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

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Surfer and Bird, 2007, oil on canvas, 18 x 34 inches

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Glebe House, 2014, monotype on paper with gouache, 10.75 x 21 inches

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Evening, Glebe House, 2014, monotype on paper with gouache, 10.75 x 21 inches

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Tim Barr Timothy Barr finds great inspiration in the landscape and serenity of rural mid-Atlantic America.

His intimate paintings of stone walled farmhouses, centuries-old trees, and domestic scenes embody the solitude and grandeur of pastoral life. While he is able to capture the beauty of the countryside, many of Barr’s compositions are the products of experience and imagination, brought to life through study, patience, and his sophisticated use of light. “I’m interested in the contrast that light brings to a scene,” Barr has said. “It’s fleeting and needs to be slowed down with paint so we can love it always.” Barr’s paintings are imbued with the characteristics of Luminism, a late 19th century technique highlighting reflective waters, magnificent skies, and heavenly spotlit pastures.

Timothy Barr was born in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, where he continues to live and work. He received a BFA from the Tyler School of Fine Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.

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Infinitely Interesting, 2012, oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches

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Moonlight Float, 2017, oil on panel, 19.25 x 17.88 inches

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Half Penny Farm, 2018, oil on panel, 16 x 24 inches

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Stroud Preserve, 2014, oil on panel, 23.75 x 23.88 inches

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Burgess Lea Farm - New Hope, 2010, oil on panel, 12 x 30 inches

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Mt. Tammany, 2019, oil on panel, 12 x 30 inches

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Silent Hope in an Empty Boat, 2015, oil on panel, 15.75 x 23.75 inches

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The Race, 2011, oil on panel, 15.88 x 40 inches

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Jacob Keim - Oley, 2012, oil on panel, 17.75 x 23.75 inches

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Doe in Sumac at Sunrise, 2014, oil on panel, 19.5 x 23.5 inches

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Higher Ground, 2011, oil on panel, 23.5 x 39.88 inches

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Brown Belted Galloway, 2012, oil on gessoed board, 11.38 x 15.63 inches

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Frozen Apples, 2018, oil on panel, 11.5 x 23.5 inches

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Frosty Morning, 2021, oil on panel, 29.75 x 26.75 inches

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Danish Glass, 2006, oil on panel, 15.5 x 19.5 inches

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Pumpkins and Lanterns, 2010, oil on panel, 15.5 x 23.63 inches

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In the Dell, 2014, oil on panel, 11.75 x 15.75 inches

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com © 2021 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC Artwork © Timothy Barr, Randall Exon, and T. Allen Lawson

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