"Working from plants around my studio, observation has become essential to rooting the paintings in an experience and giving gravity to an otherwise commonplace thing. I'm drawn to plants as they are simple, yet everchanging, and provide boundless possibilities to meditate on ephemerality, perspective and humility."
- Rebekah Callaghan
Sandy Bottom (Detail), 20" x 16", Oil On Canvas
Found and discovered by her sensitive and responsive process, Callaghan's paintings are intimate in size. They express a space which can only exist in a painting but are as close to us as the warmth of the sun falling across our cheek on a winter's day. Plants fill her canvases as she observes and then meditates upon them but her paintings could never be mistaken for simple portraits of flowers and leaves.
Callaghan's paintings speak about color, light, and space as revealed through the subtlest of skills - the artist's touch. Hues and shapes inspired by nature and the constantly changing play of light over a plant's surface are fascinations and inspirations for Callaghan. She keeps the images which slip by us, unassuming and ordinary, allowing us the time we need to see and relate to them. The way light moving across a plant's leaf reminds us that we are all under the shine of the sun, Callaghan's paintings offer us the reward of a vision where fleeting moments are inspiration enough.
"Recently, I have been making work that offers a space to lean into moments of transformation. The paintings are derived from gardens and plants: bright hues and organic shapes come directly from observations, but the recognizable elements have been abridged to broaden the landscape of touch, speed, and color.
Color is used to animate light and shadow, inventing spaces that feel familiar but that could only exist in a painting or drawing. Thin veils of paint are applied to merge new layers with old, and painted to a place where color, pressure, and form are balanced. Employing this method of call and response, each added passage responds to the one before. In a never-ending quest to combine my experience of seeing with searching, the layers call to the complexity of change while recognizing the simplicity of growth."
- Rebekah Callaghan
Gathering, 28" x 22", Oil On Canvas
Broadleaf (Detail), 10" x 8", Oil On Canvas
Rebekah Callaghan received her BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and her MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts. Callaghan teaches drawing and painting in and around the Greater Philadelphia Area. She exhibits her work throughout the United States and internationally. Her studio is based in Philadelphia, PA.
“I believe artists must make space for pleasure in painting, both in the act of painting and in the pleasure of viewing it.”
-Lauren Whearty
In her first solo exhibition with Gross McCleaf Gallery, titled Painter’s Table, Lauren Whearty celebrates cheerful color and playful patterns in a contemporary take on the artistic tradition of still life painting. With a keen eye for possibilities within this genre, Whearty embraces a feminist perspective, using everyday objects as building blocks to create her own distinctive universe. Each item she incorporates becomes a referential exploration of art history and the process of image creation, adding depth and meaning to her work.
“I have a longing for a certain beauty that’s hard to describe, but it’s usually associated with summer colors. My desire for this summertime feeling seems inexhaustible, and though I’ve been trying for many years, I don’t feel like I am ever really satisfied.”
- Kurt Moyer
For over a decade, Kurt Moyer’s work has combined his love of nature with his reverence for art history. Born in Southeastern Pennsylvania, Moyer spent much of his youth exploring the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania. Moyer now resides in rural New York near Rochester where he spends his time plein air painting from the beginning of spring until late fall. These passions converge in Moyer’s new abstract paintings on view at Gross McCleaf...
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions of new paintings by gallery artists, Rebekah Callaghan and Claire Kincade, and Pet Show, a group exhibition featuring the work of Joan Becker, Su A Chae, Eileen Goodman, Morgan Hobbs, Katie Hubbell, Darla Jackson, Christina Leone, Joseph Lozano, Douglas Martenson, Scott Noel, Bethann Parker, Frank Trefny, and Ted Walsh.
Rebekah Callaghan met the unique challenges of this past year by turning inward, moving away from observation and focusing more on her process and feelings. Callaghan scaled up the plant-based imagery. She played with color and pattern to fit the mood of the painting rather than limiting herself to a faithful adherence to the original source. . .
“I think I’ve been making the same painting for a long time and it just keeps ending in a different place at a different point,” Rebekah Callaghan told painter Aubrey Levinthal in a 2015 interview in Title Magazine. The conversation focused on Callaghan’s process of working from her immediate surroundings – her home studio and the garden of potted plants that she tends there. Now, four years later, she continues to cultivate and expand upon this familiar material to make layered, luminous botanical paintings that invite sustained looking. Walking from one deft, concise painting to the next in her current exhibition “Brighter Later,” at Gross McCleaf in Philadelphia, the groupings of new works constitute a coherent series exploring variations of light, color, shape, and texture on a single theme.
