ART X NATURE: KEN ELLIOTT, EUGENE HEALY, & CAROL BOUYOUCOS

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is pleased to announce ART X NATURE:  KEN ELLIOTT, EUGENE HEALY, and CAROL BOUYOUCOS, a three-person exhibition of new works.  The exhibition will be on view from February 10 - March 18, 2023, with an opening reception and happy hour on Saturday, February 11, 2023, from 4 - 6:00 pm.  The public is invited to attend.  

The world around us seems to be unobtrusive to our everyday lives, a background for our goals, ambitions, and daily activities.  But for these three artists, their individual, natural environment is both a defining source of inspiration, and a foundation for creating art which defines their careers.  Coming from different areas of the US, Elliot from Colorado, Healy from Connecticut, and Bouyoucos from Westchester County, New York, the dynamic, wide-ranging art practices of these artists engage art history and contemporary culture. The fascination, devotion, and study of their immediate, natural surroundings provide an unending fount for transcendent scenes and artistic invention.   

Employing a variety of approaches, from painting and collage to digital photography, each artist articulates a particular notion of place, and use landscape for their own purposes:  to experiment with space, line, and other formal elements of composition; to record personal experiences and feelings about the environment, or to relate an attachment to a personal habitat.  Compositions oscillate between abstraction and representation, combining the real with the unreal, sometimes giving both a tactile and visual experience.    

Colorado based artist KEN ELLIOTT’s works are focused on the western landscape. Inspired by the rural scenery outside his kitchen window, the artist does not try to recreate nature or attempt storytelling but instead, wields color boldly, creating vibrant scenes that are both animated and serene. Working mainly with oils and pastels, the compositions are infused with a vivid and dramatic color palette, as he works toward his goal to thrill himself. Colors in the Breeze III is a beautiful illustration of Elliott’s practice. Beginning as a series of vertical gestures for the tree placements, he infuses a range of colors, layering one over the other, creating a variety of contrasts. Moving left to right, the palette of colors intensifies, from the pastel hues of yellow, pink, and light blue to the dark blue and forest green on the opposite side. Richly stimulating and at times poetic, Elliot’s works are direct, showing the lessons of the Impressionist as well as Modern school. 

EUGENE HEALY is recognized for his abstract, collage-paintings of favorite shore towns and local beaches along the New England and Connecticut shore, where Healy has resided for over 25 years. His minimalist seascapes are inspired by the forms and colors he sees in his coastal surroundings, and employ a variety of mediums ranging from oil, watercolor, encaustic, oil crayon, lacquers, and colored pencil applied to fragments of canvas, boards, and paper. Taking inspiration from painters such as Matisse, Vermeer, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Hoffman, and Fauvism, Healy’s distilled shapes and colors yield a vocabulary of the implied landscape yet remains fundamentally non-objective.   

Balancing between digital painting, collage, and photography, CAROL BOUYOUCOS lives and works on a nature preserve and takes iPhone pictures of the surrounding forest. She then digitally alters and combines these photographs with historical images. The resulting photomontages, created with distinctly 21st century tools, evoke the romanticism and nostalgia of nineteenth-century art and highlight cumulative changes to the land caused by man. They compel viewers to see nature anew—and to consider our role in both its destruction and preservation. 

Thoroughly contemporary in their representation and execution, the exhibited works are far more than just aesthetic renderings of landscape scenes but an expression of the sensation and grandeur of nature as subject matter.