First Friday : June 2
Artist Reception: June 4, 1-4pm
Artist Talk: June 18, 3pm
Bruce Garrity’s landscapes are poetic explorations of pictorial inventions and equivalents for the visual experience of nature. The paintings are developed from perception; in on-site drawings and paintings, memory and the experience of history/art history. The paintings utilize a broad vocabulary of painterly mark, color and texture in the pursuit of visual drama.
These spaces are the more intimate surroundings of forest interiors, the being in as opposed to the looking upon these circumstances. Trees and boulders punctuate the space. Water, whether tranquil and transparent or rushing through rock cataracts or waterfalls becomes the voice of the forest, and is often the only indication of the sky.
The areas that are depicted, mostly of the Delaware Water Gap, are familiar places, visited again and again year after year with family and students. There is an intimacy with the changes in these places, cycles of decay and renewal, both natural and manmade. The work creates a heightened experience of nature. A saturated color palette, suggesting a kind of infra-vision, invokes the sounds and smells of the forest, as well as a palpable sense of life. The layering of calligraphic marks, glazes and thick impastos of pigment articulate the energy and vitality of the natural world.
The small wild places in the paintings are often just out of view of human encroachments of housing, highway and industry. This juxtaposition suggests the human presence even when the figure is unseen and focuses on engaging the viewer as an implicit participant.
Bruce Garrity’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, most recently in the exhibitions ”Bruce Garrity: Recent Work” at 3rd Street Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, “Bruce Garrity: Smaller Works” at the Rehoboth Art League in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, “Bruce Garrity: Paintings and Works in Progress” at The University of Delaware Department of Art Gallery in Newark, Delaware and “Into the Woods” at the Frank Guaracini Jr. Fine and Performing Art Center, in Vineland, New Jersey.
The artist’s work is in numerous private and public collections including The Stedman Art Gallery of Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, The Hoyt Institute in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Cooper Medical Center, Camden, New Jersey, and Capital One Financial, Wilmington, Delaware.
He has taught at Rutgers University in Camden since 1997. He has also been an adjunct faculty member at the University of Delaware, Stockton College, Rowan University, Delaware College of Art and Design.
Garrity received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from the University of Delaware, and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He lives and works in Penns Grove, NJ.