BmoreArt

Exeter Gallery
241 South Exeter Street : 21202

November 21^st – January 10^th

Two consecutive exhibitions, “Night & Day,” celebrate dualism in the work of David Jewell: light and dark, construction and destruction, drawing and painting, finished and unresolved, hope and despair.

The first of these two exhibitions, “Night,” is on view now with a reception on Saturday, December 21^st   3-6pm, just before the winter solstice. “Day” will run from January 17^th – February 29^th with a reception on February 15^th.  Exeter is open by appointment only. Email [email protected] or call 443-250-2345 to coordinate a visit.

Jewell’s underdrawings are built in geometric terms. They are wrought by perspective, isometry, and mathematics. There is an exactitude in this work, a mysterious knowledge and execution in the drawing, that underpins these paintings which could snuff out human tenderness under another artist’s hands. But when Jewell uses this linear armature, he is free to paint with joy, doubt, carelessness, despair, and deep reverence. The surfaces of these painting are replete with thumb prints, globs, sparkles of gold, cookie crumbs, napkin daubs, big swooshing slops, and intricate stipples which coalesce. Each painting is really many paintings, over paintings, over paintings… built like layers of dust swirling endlessly on a desert plateau. It is apparent that these paintings have been found through a deliberate searching, even fumbling, by the artist. Yet the final state of the painting feels paradoxically inevitable. Like coming upon a ruin and realizing that, only through the forces enacted upon stone over a millennium, did the thing come to bear the beauty it possesses now.

Jewell’s insatiable creativity and boundless productivity is perhaps only matched by fits of careening destruction. Some years ago, after returning from a trip to Martha’s Vineyard where the artist made many beautiful landscapes over the period of a month, he asked to borrow my table saw. I gladly obliged and was horrified later to find tiny squares of the formerly whole paintings littering the trash. Another time, after discovering that his massive painting on linen had sagged in his humid midwestern studio, he destroyed the painting. David Jewell personifies a duality inherent in the creative process. The cycle of making and destroying is central to the creative process of many of our greatest artists and seems to be the underlying principal of all ten of Richard Diebenkorn’s Notes to Myself on Beginning a Painting found among his papers after his death in 1993.

Jewell typically paints in oil and acrylic on panel. Sometimes the panels are covered by canvas or muslin. Other times the paint is applied to canvas on stretchers. “Night” features a sampling of twenty-four paintings spanning a period of twenty years. The show is comprised of predominantly still life, some allegorical scenes (his Social Media Failure series), and a few nocturnes. A group of small heads painted on cigar box panels as classroom demonstrations are also included in the exhibition. These works are extremely reduced and almost three-tone in nature. Large geometric forms, reminiscent of Euan Uglow and Catherine Kehoe but with a more subtle earthen palette, are broken down into smaller more particular fragments that define individualized headshapes and features. By combining ochre, black and white and allowing the rich amber tones of the wood to show though Jewell can make white appear blue or make greens by combining ochre and black. These simple paintings demonstrate Jewell’s masterful understanding of structures and temperature shifts and offer a nice counterpoint to the larger and dauntingly complex compositions throughout the exhibition.

Leah Clare Michaels: Melpomene & The Trinity of Mourning | Closing Reception
Sunday, December 22nd • 3-5pm