Woody Gwyn is recognized as one of today’s finest realist painters of the American landscape and is known for his incredible level of detail, radiant lighting, and an unconventional approach to composition.
Gwyn’s exhibition of new paintings and mixed-media works on paper, Continued Dominions, is on view at LewAllen Galleries June 30 through August 20, 2023. With extraordinary luminosity, purity of color, and minutest of detail, it might be said that Woody Gwyn is a painter of clarity itself. Gwyn’s paintings provide refreshing reminders of how exhilarating nature’s lucidity can be. Gwyn is regarded for his passion about finding what he calls “the truth of the land.” He paints exactingly from close study of his subject, whether shimmering sea coast, highway vista, arboreal image, starry sky or Southwestern mesa and arroyo, to name but a few examples of his varied subjects. His work usually begins, in Gwyn’s words, “out in the field” with plein air sketches and watercolors as direct and immediate record of his observations and impressions on site. The marks of Gwyn’s brush then translates in his studio into new ways of seeing the world he reveres onto his canvases, panels and works on paper.
For Gwyn, the quotidian doesn't exist. The divine is everywhere. His subjects are the elements of earth, water, sun, and sky, and he treats landscape with reverence, as though it already exists as a work of art before he paints it.
The new paintings and mixed media works on paper included in Continued Dominions extend by popular demand the extremely successful exhibition of Gwyn’s latest work that was held at LewAllen earlier in the Spring of this year and is augmented with additional works by the artist in a variety of scenes, scales, and media.
Woody Gwyn was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1944, and received his arts education from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He moved to New Mexico in 1974 and was the 2010 recipient of New Mexico’s highest artistic honor, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for Painting. His work is in numerous museum and private collections around the nation.