Betsy Eby: of this natural world

Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to present Betsy Eby: of this natural world, her first solo exhibition at the gallery. The public is invited to attend an opening reception for the artist on September 26, 5-7pm, and the show will run through November 2nd.

Betsy Eby’s encaustic paintings are infused with a unique sensibility informed by the artist’s Pacific Northwest heritage, her concerns for nature and a lifelong classical piano practice. Using trowels, knives, brushes and heat, Eby pours and spreads hot and cold natural wax-based paint onto the canvas, which is then mounted on panel, layering gestures to create nuanced marks across the surface. The paintings in this exhibition are inspired by the wilderness of nature and the way in which the natural world serves as a tonic for the human spirit. Created in her Maine summer retreat, Eby’s new body of work captures the music and rhythms portrayed in nature: the lulling of waves, the fragrance of the sea air, resinous bay berries, blueberries, honey suckle in the breeze…. all have their own sound and melodies that speak to the artist. “There is musical accompaniment in nature”, the artist states.

Eby savors nature holistically, poetically depicting the essence of the verdant and granite landscape against the backdrop of a shimmering coastline, using abstraction to fuse that which animates her senses. Like notes shimmering on a page, the paintings are soft gestures akin to ascending scales, glissandos or arpeggiations within ambient-like sound beds. The marks on Ravel, glyphs fleeting across the surface within and through atmospheric grounds, came from listening to the composer in the background as she worked in the studio. Eby’s work synthesizes and distills all that surrounds her, intuitively harnessing and conveying her environment onto the canvas. Setting Eby’s new paintings apart from previous series are the grounds, which at first glance appear more neutral but are informed with a shifting colored nuance. The artist finds herself with a more atuned sensory input of late, and this is evident in her most recent work.

“I make nature based, abstract paintings that convey the musical frequencies of an ecologically balanced, natural world unspoiled by human encroachment. They are meditations on undisrupted skies, habitats and oceans, calling attention to the natural rhythms of our environment and the elements and our interconnectedness within them”.

Eby received her B.A. from the University of Oregon and splits her time between her studios in Columbus, Georgia and Wheaton Island in Maine. She has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions and her work forms part of many important private, corporate and public collections including the Columbus Museum and the Georgia Museum of Art in Georgia; the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington; and the Art in Embassies in Gambia, Brunei, Dubai and Papua New Guinea.