Santa Fe's Holy Trinity of Landscape Painting:
John Fincher, Woody Gwyn & Forrest Moses

Exhibition: July 19 – September 1, 2013
Artist Reception: Friday, July 19, 5 – 7PM

SANTA FE, NM — LewAllen Galleries is pleased to present Santa Fe’s Holy Trinity of Landscape Painting, a group exhibition of new works by three venerated landscape painters: John Fincher, Woody Gwyn and Forrest Moses. The show will be on view from July 19 through September 1, 2013 at the gallery’s Railyard location. The appellation of “holy trinity” to describe this revered trio was coined by art writer and former museum executive John O’Hern in a 2011 article for the American Art Collector magazine. He celebrated these three major figures of American landscape painting for their differing visual interpretations of the beauty of the world surrounding them.

Fincher has the eye of a sage, seeing in small details of Western landscape—as unassuming as cactus spines and poplar trees—the timeless and enduring strength, integrity and rustic beauty that have come to signify a powerful aspect of the American character. The precise realism of Gwyn’s detailed vistas, his canny use of unconventional perspective, ingenious light and unexpected relationships between compositional elements, elevates humble settings to breathtaking experiences. Moses’ deft, often reductive series of brushstrokes and color tracts powerfully ignite memory and emotion as deep and intense as his own feelings for the woods, ponds and streams that inspire him.

Fincher’s paintings are snapshots—candids, magnifications, celebrations—of the cactus, trees, fences, and other fragments that make up the complex beauty of the American West. Fincher’s nuanced sense for contrasting color and interplay between small and large, mundane and mythic imbues his canvas with a sense of delight and reverence. There is a direct honesty, both in his paring down of a majestic landscape to common details and in his audacious use of electric color and vivid shadowing that imparts a sense of the energy and optimism associated with the land he paints. He seeks, in his own words, "to discover nature’s truth and give life to a painted image by understanding the rhythms and pulses behind appearances.” As such, his works stress brevity and simplicity to importance of negative space or nothingness as juxtaposition to objects of nature that already occupy the world.

With a direct honesty—the goal of “painting things the way they are” —Woody Gwyn’s humility belies the complex techniques and masterful painting skills that have made him one of the most acclaimed realist painters of the American landscape. Gwyn is celebrated for his use of unusual perspective and dramatic angles, an ability to render the ordinary as heroic, color that is as lushly romantic as it is grippingly real, baffling capacities to capture light that alternates between the crystalline and the veiled.

A virtuoso at bringing out an epic realism of the American landscape against the challenge to extract the beauty from the guardrail, stop sign or the everyday man-made object attests to Gwyn’s mastery of painting. The viewer is captivated by the poetic affinity to make a subtle comparison between the natural and the manmade. His conception of the beautiful leaves no doubt that a mountain or ocean can be in aesthetic union with a guardrail or highway. At his hand, the ordinary suddenly is significant and the current becomes timeless.

Moses is one of the most renowned painters working today, creating abstracted renditions of landscape that evoke more than depict. Through a reductive sense of the essential and a subtle but intense power of expression, Moses liberates the imagination and opens the possibility for contemplation of the sublime. His paintings and monotypes inspire poetic—even potentially transcendent—visual experience for the viewer and enable meditative associations of image with memory of being in nature. Through his expression of a unique and synergistic union among mind, heart and hand, Moses produces an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, expertly balanced compositions include no more than is necessary in the service of evocation, and a uniquely refined and fluid elegance informs each and every brushstroke.

All three of these remarkable artists are at the pinnacle of their painting careers. Together they represent some of the finest innovative visual conceptions in the long history of landscape painting. The “Holy Trinity” celebrates the unique contribution by each to this genre and the enlivening energy their work resonates in combination.

A full online catalog of the exhibition will be available at www.LewAllenGalleries.com

For additional information and images, please contact Taylor Hughes by phone at 505-988-3250 or via email at [email protected].