OPENING: SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 FROM 5 TO 7PM

About the Exhibition:

Time Revisited explores and finds new interpretations of the works of Loren Dunlap and Brian O'Leary. A journey from realism to abstraction through the eyes of two singular artists. Curated by Lana Jokel.

“It's tempting to resort to the threadbare phrase Renaissance man to describe Loren Dunlap. But actually, he's more of a one-man Renaissance."

Quote by Martin Puris on Loren Dunlap

"There are qualities to his paintings that are unmistakably his: complex, vibrant, all-over compositions; the juxtaposition of disparate, dynamic components, and a certain resistance to interpretation."

Mark Segal on Brian O'Leary taken from East Hampton Star May 5, 2022

RSVP for a conversation Moderated by Curator Lana Jokel

August 27, 5 to 7pm

Loren Dunlap

In Loren Dunlap's paintings, the viewer experiences both Dunlap's craftsmanship and intelligence, a combination that stimulates the viewer's senses. Like ethereal symbols, Dunlap's paintings are marked by a pleasing and sensual surface beauty. But when the viewer looks deeper, he experiences Dunlap's works as character studies with each object becoming more meaningful and more sustaining. Dunlap's paintings are the product of a strong and deep talent through which Dunlap records the nature of things as he understands them consistent with his Epicurean beliefs.

Born in Indiana in 1932 at the beginning of the Great Depression, Dunlap spent his early years in both urban and rural environments. He spent school months in a small factory town with the usual modern conveniences and trappings. Summers, holidays, reunions and family gatherings were spent at his grandparents' farm. Like many Midwestern farms in the 1930s, the Dunlap family farm maintained the traditions and practices of the 18th and 19th centuries. Horses were used for transportation and fieldwork. Electricity generated by windmills powered the pumps and the radio that the family listened to during evening hours as they sat under the light of kerosene lanterns. The only "modern" convenience at the farm was the 1929 Ford automobile reserved for emergencies and special occasions. This combination of traditional and modern conventions that defined Dunlap's early years helps one to understand Dunlap's later work as an artist.

During his formative years as a painter, Dunlap trained and painted abstractly. In the late 1950s, he began a series of imaginary landscapes that in turn led to a cycle of tree paintings done in California during the mid-1960s. In both instances, the method and emphasis was to find images of nature in abstract situations. His abstract training is reflected in his technical awareness of textures and surfaces. His balance of different pictorial spaces within a painting and his clever playfulness with compositional devices. During his latter years, due to health issues, he transitioned to brilliant, colorful Collages.

"Dunlap’s collages work with visual connective aspects, like synapses, and step back from the pictorial approach to painting. Flashes of imagery reach out across each piece, relating to other images situated in various locations of the work. His use of recycled paper goods and newspapers, labels, stamped envelopes, corrugated cardboard, clothing scraps and paint artfully captures the viewer's attention and then as quickly requires one to connect the dots or focus the work to get the entire picture. As he would tell you, He loved art in all its glory."

Quote from Cee Scott Brown

"It's tempting to resort to the threadbare phrase Renaissance man to describe Loren Dunlap. But actually, he's more of a one-man Renaissance. An artist of outstanding ability, but also a poet, a writer, a social pundit, a teacher, an omnivorous reader, a gardener, an architectural designer, a philosopher, and an historian."

Quote from Martin Puris

Brian O'Leary

What I like to do the first couple of days when I paint is just have? fun. I want to be like a kid. I like to have at least a day or two of that kind of energy in the work before I even think about it as a painting. Some paintings will try to get made really early, but I won't let that happen. I don't think paintings have to mean anything. And they mean different things to different people anyway. When a painting remains enigmatic, "I don't mind that. I don't want the resolution to be anything other than the energy of the piece”.

Taken from East Hampton Star, May, 5, 2022 by Mark Segal

The scale and dimensions of Brian O’Leary’s paintings from the '80s, many 8 by 12 feet, were inspired in part by the screen at the St. Mark's Cinema. While elements of the compositions are realistic -coffee cups, a hot dog on a roll, classical and mythological figures, a roiling ocean - their disparate styles and often fragmentary images combine into complex and somewhat surreal landscapes bursting with color and dynamism.

When Mr. O'Leary was working at One Fifth Avenue during the early '80s, Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein were regular patrons. They invited him out to Southampton for a weekend, and a friendship developed. "I did a lot of physical work at his house in Southampton, and then in 1983 he asked me to be on the crew for his Greene Street mural." The first of four mural projects he worked on for Lichtenstein, it was created at the Leo Castelli Gallery and measured 18 by 96 1/2 feet. Others were created in Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and New York.

His own work took a radical turn with the turn of the century. "I decided to take everything out of the painting I could take out, and still have it be a painting. It was the first time I had worked with no subject matter, no color, no images. If I saw one, it had to go. Images can pop up really fast; you can't stop them when you're painting."

At the same time, he took pains to disagree with the notion that abstraction and figuration are oppositional. "I think all paintings are equivalent. There are an infinite number of shades, going from photorealism to a complete de Kooning type of abstraction, or paintings that are just one color. There are a million different ways to arrange figuration and abstraction."

Color and recognizable images have returned to some degree in his more recent paintings He uses a variety of tools to apply the tar, among them metal serrated scrapers that add dimension by leaving the surface scored. Once oil and tar are combined, the painting surface is nearly indestructible.

Yet there are qualities to his paintings, from the earliest years to the present, that are unmistakably his: complex, vibrant, all-over compositions; the juxtaposition of disparate, dynamic components, and a certain resistance to interpretation.