Opening Reception : Saturday September 26th from 3-5pm
Katherine Downey Miller, renowned New England artist known for her work that moves between landscape and abstraction, exhibits a homecoming for the artist. It was at Halibut Point, less than five miles from the gallery's door, that she first absorbed the raw energy of the Atlantic as a child, and it is that coastline, its beauty, its violence, its vast unknowability, that she has spent a career translating into paint. The exhibition brings together works on canvas and paper in oil and acrylic, tracing the arc of a practice rooted in landscape and drawn, inevitably, toward the sea.
Her paintings begin in the observed world but push toward something more elemental and felt. Every work in the exhibition carries some link to water. In some, water is the subject; in others, it is the medium itself, as in her paintings on Yupo paper, where fluid, water-based media pool, bloom, and react on the synthetic surface. Built on gestural movement and the power of the emotive brushstroke, these are not pictures of the sea so much as records of its force.
Marking a significant moment in Miller’s career, the exhibition offers New England audiences a rare chance to see the evolution of her unique visual language, developed by pushing New England coastlines towards and beyond abstraction. At a moment when the region's relationship to its own coastline is changing, Miller's paintings insist that the ocean is not scenery but energy, and that paying attention to it is an act of both love and reckoning. The show is a culmination of a lifetime of looking, teaching, and painting, and a love letter to nature made in the place where that relationship began.
Katherine Downey Miller holds a BS in Studio Art and Art History from Skidmore College and an MFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts. A recipient of a teaching scholarship to Studio Arts College International in Florence, Italy, she has taught at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado and currently teaches at Concord Art, the New Art Center, and in painting workshops abroad, leading students through landscape to abstraction. She works from Miller Street Artist Studios in Somerville, Massachusetts. More at katherinedmiller.com.
