Herbert Creecy : The Nocturnal Desires at Bill Lowe Gallery - www.lowegallery.com

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RBERT CREECY (1939 - 2003) CTURNAL DESIRES

EXPLORATION OF SEXUAL RAPTURE

HERBERT CREECY NOCTURNAL DESIRES

(1939 - 2003)

Decidedly earthy and always inventive, Herbert Creecy was part Abstract Expressionist wild man, part truth-seeker, and part pseudo-hayseed who was blessed with the sensibility of a philosopher king. He was a painter who obsessively made art for more than forty years - a passion that took hold of him in high school, propelled him through studies at the Atlanta College of Art, and landed him a fellowship from the government of France to work with printmaker Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, in Paris, at age twenty-five. He apprenticed for a year and joined the ranks of an august group of other Hayter - trained artists including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, and Pablo Picasso. Creecy eventually found his artistic center in old six-thousandsquare-foot former cotton warehouse in Barnesville, sixty miles southwest of Atlanta, Georgia where he worked and often lived for a quarter-century.

Now heralded as the most significant Abstract Expressionist painter ever to come from the South, Herbert Creecy’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, as well as in a vast array of blue-chip corporate and private collections.

In the series, Nocturnal Desires, explored the female form, with an explosive eroticism that reflected his passionate, often tempestuous romantic relationships. In his universe, feminine was liquid mercury - dazzling to behold, arousing man’s most primal and exalted instincts; at the same time capable of driving a man to either ecstasy or madness.

. . . Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied . . .

Octavio Paz

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : DREAMS OF BUDAPEST, 1996 Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas 32 x 33 Inches

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : THE OFFERING, 1996 Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas 34 x 39 Inches

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : THE HUNGER, 1997 Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas 20 x 54 Inches

. . . The poem you make of me.

Touching you, I catch midnight, as moon fires set in my throat . . .

I love you flesh into blossom.

I made you, and take you made into me . . .

Audre Lorde

NOCT

TURNAL DESIRES : THE CONSUMMATION, 1995, Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas, 30 x 47 Inches

NOCTURNAL

DESIRES : TITILLATION, 1996, Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas, 27 x 36 Inches

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : BLACK DAHLIA, 1996 Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas 30 x 37 Inches

. . . As your body moves under my hands charged and waiting, we cut the leash.

You create me against your thighs, hilly with images moving through our word countries, my body writes into your flesh . . .

Audre Lorde

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : NUDE IN ECSTASY, 1997 Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas 34 x 34 Inches

. . . In this state one enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is—art . . .

Friedrich Nietzsche

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : MORNING OF THE GREEN MIST, 1996-1997 Oil, Acrylic, Collage and Mixed Media on Canvas 66 x 60 Inches

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : THE SURRENDER, 1999 Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas 35 x 30 Inches

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires”.

William Shakespeare

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : INSATIABLE, 1993 Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas 62 x 53 Inches

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : THE AFTERMATH, 1996, Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas, 32 x 33 Inches

NOCTURNAL DESIRES : JADE NUDE, 1998 Oil, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas 62 x 53 Inches

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