Gerard Erley
December 5, 2008 - January 24, 2009
Armstrong Gallery
Gerard Erley’s, After Hours, is on view in the McLean County Arts Center’s Armstrong Gallery December 5, 2008 through January 24, 2009. Please join us at the opening reception for the artist on Friday, December 5th, 5pm to 7pm.
Erley has been painting for over fifteen years. He has concentrated on presenting landscape imagery in oil paint since completing his Masters in 1992 at Illinois State University. The focus of his current work is explorations of the nocturnal landscape. Erley mines the expressive potential of the evening hours by shaping night-time’s unique mysteries and harbored nuances. He is challenged to find the form, light, and color lurking in the shadows.
In the studio, Erley paints intuitively, without the aid of photographs or on-site sketches. Rather, he draws on his mental recollections of art historical references (from J.M.W. Turner to Ralph Albert Blakelock, Caspar David Friedrich to Claude Joseph Vernet) and personal memories of nature and landscape to construct his work. Beginning with a thin under-painting on canvas or hardboard, he builds up alternate layers of opaque passages and transparent glazes to produce a painterly image that has a certain veracity to nature but also a somewhat ambiguous, dreamy quality.
Erley has an established national reputation, and his work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions. He participates in juried arts festivals and has won over thirty awards. His paintings are included in many private, public and corporate collections in Illinois, Indiana, South Carolina, Georgia, and Ohio.
Artist Statement:
Although my paintings present the landscape, I do not paint nature in an attempt to duplicate what the eye sees. Rather, I explore landscape imagery for its expressive potential, its unique emotional language. I seek to discover the poetry in a solitary tree or a passing cloud and to communicate that poetry in paint.
- Gerard Erley