Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico
April 28 - May 29, 2017
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Anne Appleby’s Winter into Spring, presents work which brings the wholeness, the experience of seeing into physical existence on the walls of the gallery. Combining her love of color and abstraction with the intimate knowledge and relationship with the natural world which she acquired studying with an Ojibwe elder, Appleby’s work challenges viewers to see rather than look.
These paintings reflect the activity of an intimate relationship over time. Each panel highlights a different part of the plant – a catkin, a leaf, a seed, a bud. However, the color-echoes are more than just simple or singular observations – they are a recording of the actual experience of seeing a particular cottonwood, a certain juniper, over days, weeks. The history of color shift in the painting is also a history of colors changing as the plant grows, hardens, dies, is reborn in spring – and of the change from a cool cloudy morning to a bright sunny mid-day.
As Appleby has said, “My paintings aren’t about the other world. They’re about our place in this world. What nourishes the soul is the experience of being in the body.” Each of the pieces in Winter into Spring is a part of a larger whole, a touchstone from which the viewer may re-orient herself, bodily, on the planet. The paintings of Anne Appleby remind us that art is about more than just how we see the world – art reminds us that how we see is determined by who we are.
oil and wax on panel
41 x 41 inches
oil and wax on wood panel
30 x 92 inches
oil and wax on panel
37 x 37 inches