Steve Driscoll – Heaven is Where You Find it
December 8th – January 14th 2012
Opening reception Thursday December 8th 6–9 PM
Angell Gallery is pleased to present Heaven is Where You Find it, the much-anticipated second solo exhibition by gallery artist Steve Driscoll. The exhibition will be on display in the West Gallery from December 8th, 2011 to January 14th, 2012. An opening reception will be held on Thursday December 8th from 6:00-9:00pm.
Steve Driscoll’s paintings are steeped in the romance of Canadian landscape. His deep knowledge of the tradition in this country of recording our natural surroundings in art, and his own experience of the real thing collide in his work, producing passionate documents of those experiences. Attempting to represent wind and sky, water, movement, and all the flux of nature, Driscoll turned to the medium of urethane to achieve the sparkle and trembling effects of light he wanted to capture; increasing skill with his self-made paints has brought a confidence in representing his subjects to his work, where he picks out details in a tree or the window of a cabin that photography itself has trouble emphasizing, and invest them with his own particular spiritual force. Animated and unified by his painting technique, his works are distinct in their mood and tone; nature is here with us.
Like the Group of Seven and the French Impressionists before him, Driscoll is totally unafraid to deploy strong colour, not only as an expressive vehicle and an emotional response to landscape, but also in a technical capacity as the site of local hues belonging to objects and to atmosphere. His work points out to us that the full grandeur and scale of landscape, in the small things as well as the big, is a thing we tend somehow to forget; orange skies and violet waters though actually are real, and the artist is correct in reminding us, in remembering for us. He returns us to what we always have but in our urban existences can find it hard to hold onto with full force: the fact that not only the artist but really all of us are in, and truly are nature.
An OCAD graduate, Steve’s work has been exhibited in various galleries across Canada (Toronto, ON; Vancouver, BC; St. Johns and Pouch Cove, NF), the United States (Long Branch, NJ; New York, NY) as well as in Copenhagen, Denmark. His work has received notable attention from a variety of notable sources, including Canadian Art, Toronto Life, NOW Magazine, Toronto Star, The Telegram, Current Magazine and Eye Weekly.
For more information, please visit: http://www.angellgallery.com/artists/steve_driscoll/?shows=1&detail=126