Solo exhibition by Maine-based artist Melanie Essex at Connelly Martin Gallery, exploring weather and landscape through representation and abstraction.
Melanie Essex brings her first solo exhibition to Connelly Martin Gallery on Saturday, October 10, with an opening reception from 5 to 7 PM. The show, titled Atmospheric, stays on view through November 7, so if you can't make the opening, you've got a few weeks to catch it on your own time.
Essex is a Maine artist, born in 1959, and her work starts with observing and responding to the natural world. She works from a studio near Cushing, where she looks out over Broad Cove toward the St. George Peninsula. From there, weather moves south to north up the St. George River and changes by the hour, the season, and the light. It's a landscape with a long painting tradition—Marsden Hartley, the Wyeth family, Alex Katz, and Lois Dodd have all worked from it.
Her path to this show took her through Harvard and the New York Studio School, then a post-graduate year at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts in Brussels. She spent two decades in London, where her work focused on the cityscape, before returning to Maine in 2016. Her paintings move between representation and abstraction, drawing on memory, perception, and observation to capture fleeting conditions. In Atmospheric, weather itself, rather than the specifics of the landscape, is the predominant element.
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Admission is free. The reception is Saturday, October 10, from 5 to 7 PM at Connelly Martin Gallery, 1406 W. Sixth St., Austin, TX 78703, and the exhibition runs through November 7.
