Don Resnick’s ‘Essence of Place’

(Page 3 of 4)
“Resnick is one of a handful of significant painters who continue to devote their talents to portraying the American landscape,” Paul Duval wrote in “Don Resnick: Toward the Light,” which is excerpted on the Odon Wagner Gallery’s website. “Inevitably, his work has evolved and changed over time. His most recent works revealed an increasingly loose, even impulsive brushwork, and an almost watercolour-like lucidity. There is also a fresh concern with the marriage between sun, sea and land that takes place during the setting of the sun. The resulting luminosity appears as a creative current throughout his recent works, whether depicting closely tangled woods or vast open shorelines. Light is the unifying element, even in his few quiet nocturnes.”
“In his paintings Resnick reveals that selective vision, born of a long and observant familiarity with his themes, amounts to what may be described as a creative instinct. The role of the artist is to take his theme, no matter how ordinary, and allow us to see it anew. Resnick works magic to make the commonplace transform into the luminous.”
That notion is on display for all to see at the Emily Lowe Gallery. “Don Resnick’s art has the ability to transform the canvas into new realms of quiet tranquility that abound with a wonder at the delicacy of the natural world, or to synthesize experiential strands, based upon his memories of place, into canvases bursting forth with infinite majesty,” Levinthal said. “We are pleased to feature these magnificent works that engage and inspire us all.”
“It was in the 1990s that I first encountered the work of Don Resnick,” Levinthal states in the accompanying exhibit catalog’s introduction. “I was transfixed by his brilliant use of color upon his canvases and the way his trained artist’s eye and hand combined with his extraordinary talent to express a deep affinity with nature and the environment…In each canvas he captures for us the magnificence that nature has provided, and in his way beckons us to protect and preserve the environment.”
Page 3 / 4