LILY PRINCE

Recurring Waves of Arrival

Paintings

March 8 – April 28, 2018

Lago di Como 1, 2017, 55x64, Watercolor and gouache on paper

Lily Prince - Recurring Waves of Arrival – Paintings. The exhibit, Recurring Waves of Arrival, will run from March 8 through April 28, 2018. The exhibition title, Recurring Waves of Arrival, is taken from a line in a John Ashbery poem.

Lily Prince, whose process includes oil pastel drawings and watercolor and gouache paintings, has an extensive exhibition and publication record. She has exhibited widely nationally and internationally and has had her work included in numerous publications and commissions. The paintings in this exhibition, Prince’s first with the gallery, are all inspired by her repeated travels to Italy, where she returns to draw frequently. Her San Giovanni d’Asso series began in 2013 when she was staying for an extended time in a tiny Tuscan village, after completing an artist residency in southern Italy on the Adriatic Sea.

Lily Prince considers herself an explorer, studying the atmosphere of diverse spaces. Returning repeatedly to specific views, she combines illusionistic space with the interpretive mark-making inherent in the abstract ordering of the chaos of nature. While Prince’s paintings are rooted in her interpretation of one or two particular places, they combine the memory of past spaces with future aspiration. Prince’s initially observational works portray the pulsating rhythms and fecundity of both NY’s Hudson River Valley and Tuscany’s Crete Senesi. Undulating hills, rippling fertile fields, echoing distant mountains and shifting skies, have a sense of movement that knock the viewer slightly off-balance. Prince’s watercolor and gouache paintings, which range in scale from small to quite large, give the viewer the sense of flying through them, hovering, as the earth shifts in subtle twists and turns.  These paintings represent Prince’s visceral connection to nature, to the energy emanating from an evocative terrain, and her constant longing to return to it anew, like recurring waves of arrival.