BARELY DRY... and Flying Off the Walls!

Evidently, a stunnning painting from Jon McIntosh arrived in the gallery and sold before my eyes even laid upon it!  But in addition to his two recently hung paintings, Jon also brought us a gorgeous work of Western Union at dry dock. Come and snatch this one before someone else does!

Western Union in the Ways, 14" x 18"

MARIO SANCHEZ: A New Print, 'Recuerdos del Pasado'

Recuerdos del Pasado, Giclee on Paper, 16.5” x 21.5”

Mario Sanchez’s Recuerdos del Pasado (Memories of the Past) portrays Alfredo Diaz’s bodega and sandwich shop on the corner of Simonton and Virginia St. with the former Convent towering above on the extreme left. The great, great granddaughter still lives upstairs today as they have for generations. There was a gate to St. Mary's back then and you can see it behind the nun who is holding Lydia's hand. Crawfish Jack is pushing his crawfish and conch pushcart. The intaglio depicts a chicken and her three chicks in the middle of Virginia St. along with Royal Poinsiannas, a Spanish Almond and coconut tree, and two clouds. This was a gift to Alfredo Diaz.

BARELY DRY – New Works from Jon McIntosh!

Diver Down ~ Summer, 28 x 22

From the Bow, 22" x 28"

A long accomplished realist painter, Jon McIntosh’s enchantment with the waters of The Florida Keys is evident his two new paintings just hung at The Gallery on Greene. From the Bow and Diver Down ~ Summer are easy to fall in love with. The gently undulating blue water and open sky in Diver Down ~Summer pull us into the painting where a solitary boat rests peacefully at anchor while his skipper is diving unseen below the surface. From the Bow brings into perspective and contrast the dappled sunlight on the water with the closely observed lines and forms of the boat’s bow. Both works are stunning examples of the deeply introspective nature of Jon’s paintings. Come see these gems in the Gallery as the real thing far surpasses a jpeg!

BARELY DRY: 'Winter Wind' and 'At the Dock'

      At the Dock, 28" x 22"

Winter Wind, 22" x 28"

Peter Vey’s approach, technique, themes and artistic practices echo the ambience in our Southernmost city. His two new works, Winter Wind and At the Dock, reveal just that. His detailed, textural, colorful palette knife strokes, which make his work so distinctive, result in paintings that are “a lot more like a state of the mind”, as one collector related. They are each moments in time. And yet, timeless. These new works are now hanging in the Gallery, so stop by and take a look!

Barely Dry: Peter Vey's Beached Dory

Beached Dory by Peter Vey, 28 x 22

The prolific Peter Vey brings new works to walls at The Gallery on Greene. His new Beached Dory hangs among several others that take delight in the landscape of Key West: The island's abundance of natural beauty - from the water and white-sand beaches to colorful “conch” houses - are celebrated throughout his paintings. Working only with only a palette knife, Vey paints in a spontaneous manner creating canvases that are alive and fresh. He brings us the brilliance of sunlight and the deep, cool shadows they create with a spark of bright color that seems to brings it all perfectly together.

New Work from Annie Dillard

Low View From My Cabin Porch Swing

Ann Landi's ART NEWS Review of Annie Dillard

March 2010

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, and memoirist Annie Dillard − best known for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, and Teaching a Stone to Talk − is also a talented and prolific painter. Largely self-taught, Dillard generally works in oil and gouache and always on a small scale, her canvases rarely more than 16 inches to a side. A self-portrait made when she was in her early thirties shows her wielding a brush and looking rather morose about it, but other works in the show, including some landscapes, revealed an ebullience and a sure sense of color and line.

Dillard is a writer lauded as a dedicated observer of the outdoors, and not surprisingly, many of her paintings depict the water and terrain around her homes on Cape Cod, in the Virginia Mountains, and in Key West, as well as vistas of Montana and Maine. Often she reduces a scene to its bare essentials, as in Montana (1990s) and Montana II (1990s), the latter featuring a dense copse of bluish trees silhouetted against a pale lavender sky. Flat Hills (1990s) is similarly schematic, and in spite of its tiny size (nine by seven inches) suggests the monumentality of sweeping clouds and a green hill dwarfing a small red house. One of the most fanciful works here, Nutty Island (1990s), seems to portray an imaginary isle with mushroom-shaped trees and exotic yellow flora reflected in pastel waters.

Occasionally Dillard ventures into a quasi-cubist style, but she’s at her strongest when she keeps the motifs simple and the colors sprightly. While there are echoes of modernist movements in her paintings, Dillard’s voice, here, as in her writing, is very much her own: assured, perceptive and sometimes dazzling. – Ann Landi

Key West Raised, Harriet Frank Takes a New Tack At The Gallery on Greene

Collage has taken Harriet Frank, watercolorist for 52 years, on a new voyage of exploration. Raised in Key West, she received a BA at NYU, and an MFA at Columbia in New York. Except for an education in finger paints, she had been a self taught child prodigy selling at the Key West Art Center from the age of 12. Harriet finds marine scenes and sailboating an exciting format, turning them into unique collector art. She is in the permanent collection of the late Walter Cronkite and Charles Kuralt as well as many prominent island homes and yacht clubs. Her enticing collages and watercolors are viewer friendly and help to bring out in all of us the desire to sail off into paradise, to experience a joyful discovery of the sunny side of life.

To view the new work, come by The Gallery on Greene, 606 Greene St., Key West, FL www.galleryongreene.com (305) 294-1669