Author: Gwyn, Woody (b. 1944)
Title: Drive-in. Woody Gwyn. Exhibiiton Poster
Description: San Francisco: Modernism, 1986. Poster. 81 x 56cm. Woody Gwyn is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost contemporary landscape painters. Gwyn captures the crystalline light and vast expanses of the changing American terrain and majestic seascapes. His work is characterized by dramatic angles, panoramic formats, luminous color, aggressive cropping, and remarkable aesthetic harmony created between the natural and manmade.. Whether depicting monumental Western mesas, tranquil orchards, highway road cuts or shimmering ocean vistas, the results offer new ways of seeing a world he reveres. Gwyn is renowned for his facility with purity of color, radiant lighting, unconventional compositions, and the minutest of detail. It has been said about him that he is a painter of clarity itself... Gwyn’s paintings provide refreshing reminders of how exhilarating nature’s lucidity can be. He is regarded for his passion about finding what he calls “the truth of the land.” He paints exactingly from close study of his subject and 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 translate in his studio this immediacy of experience into lush canvases, panels and works on paper... In approaching a Woody Gwyn painting, it’s helpful to understand that, for the artist, 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, composed by an unseen, deific hand, whose brushes are erosions, winds and the fingers of time... One senses in his art a powerful depth of reflection and thought that underlays the vision of Woody Gwyn. His equally masterful painting skills have made him one of the most acclaimed realist painters of the American landscape. He is an extraordinary artist who clearly engages the land as a sacred place and dedicates his working life to expressing in his work the land’s redemptive and effable power of beauty... Gwyn’s paintings usually create a visual paradox that is central to the uniqueness and excellence of the work. This paradox lies in the artist’s ability to extract a sense of the extraordinary that resides hidden even in the ordinary. Gwyn is resolute in his quest to find beauty “in the way things are.” Through a masterful combination of fastidious observation and intuition, exquisite technical skill in rendering the tiniest detail, and a truly uncanny facility with suffusing pristine light into his work, Gwyn paints the unadorned reality of a subject but, in the process, radiates what the artist sees as its inherent luster... Woody Gwyn was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1944, and received his arts education from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Having moved to New Mexico in 1974, Gwyn found in his new home an awe-inspiring sense of space and scale, the ideal environment to center his artistic practice. His work has been exhibited in national and international museums including the Tel Aviv Museum in Tel Aviv, Israel; le Centre Nationale des Arts Plastiques in Paris, France; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery of George Washington University in Washington, DC; and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Gwyn was the 2010 recipient of New Mexico’s highest artistic honor, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for Painting. .

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