EARLVILLE – The Earlville Opera House Arts Center will be hosting three new gallery openings from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday. Come help us celebrate these artists: “Palette and Pattern Variations: Recent Work with Pastel” by alumni artist Mary Padgett, “Light and Color Plus” by Brooklyn painter Jisoo Lee, and “Expressway” by Liverpool painter Deborah Walsh.
Showing in the East Gallery, the paintings in Jisoo Lee’s “Light and Color Plus,” explode with light and color in large abstract oils. Her work was recently the topic of an essay by Lilly Wei, a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and is a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific. “The pleasures to be found in Lee’s current paintings-and they are many-derive in part from the imagery and in part from the elusiveness and sensitivity of that imagery, from the tension between the abstract and the figurative, heat and coolness, elegantly complex colors and modulated tonalities. As they waver between illusion and reality, they radiate a hothouse aura, an enigmatic charm.” Jisoo Lee grew up in Seoul, Korea and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute of Fine Art. She has exhibited widely many selected group exhibitions and solo shows in United States and other countries as well.
In the West Gallery, pastel artist Mary Padgett returns to the EOH galleries by special request as part of the celebration of 40th Anniversary of the Earlville Opera House. Mary Padgett is one of the gallery committee’s favorite artists who last showed here in 1998 with her hay bales series that captured our hillsides. The current show captures a different beauty: “My intent is to use this language of line and color to communicate qualities of my subject while maintaining the unique integrity of the medium. My subjects present color opportunities that the rich color quality of pastel can amplify; color experience is always a significant characteristic of my paintings.” With her subtle use of color and expressive line, her pastel flowers are resplendent.
