Land and Light

Kathryn Metz: Land and Light
Paintings and Woodcut Prints

When:  Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where: Fig Garden Village Gallery
Conversation with the Artist: Fri., June 13, 2:45 pm

Wherever one is drawing, painting or printmaking, aspiration, the love of the processes and our heritage is a consuming, non-verbal, meditative involvement. This may be one reason why in our increasingly troubled world art prevails in each generation. Now, there is the additional dimension of subtle or blatant pleas for preservation of natural habitat as a continual inspiration and resource for posterity.
                                                     --- Kathryn Metz

Kathryn Metz, Professor Emerita of Art at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is an accomplished artist whose work has been collected by such prestigious institutions as the New York Public Library, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chamaliers, France, and the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation in Los Angeles. The Museum’s current exhibition, Kathryn Metz: Land and Light, explores the poetic relationship between painting and the natural landscape permeated with light. Her work explores fleeting impressions of color and light much as the Impressionist French painters of the 19th century did as they used the research of Eugène Chevreul to achieve a more exact representation of color and tone.

Metz’ Neo-impressionist paintings have been created by a similar divisionist technique used by Georges Seurat where each color is composed of tiny particles of pure color that represent not only the color of the landscape but also the color of light on the land’s form. Abstract landscape space has been created by atmospheric brushstrokes suggesting elements of the tangible world producing works imbued with a serene and contemplative presence. The thirteen paintings, dating from 1983 through 2007, are based on plein air drawings or watercolors of sites on the coast at San Gregorio, in Tuscany, the Orkney Islands, Southern England and the nearby wetlands area of Watsonville. By capturing fleeting impressions of color and light, Metz, in her studio work, has filled her large canvases with a quiet intensity of pastel glowing light of early morning and the dusk of evening mist.

The paintings’ large scale and shimmering bits of color and light create the sensation of a kind of middle space between land and sky, a land of light, cloud, mist and air. This work is cohesive in presenting a landscape untouched by the encroachment of development – reminding us of what we lose as the natural world is devastated by intensive and poorly planned urbanization. Metz’ concern for the environment and the preservation of natural habitat is expressed in each of her paintings that evoke a keen sense of the fragile atmosphere of coastal fogs and mists. Organic forms, spaces and panoramas are the language of her visual world.

A native of Dayton, Ohio, Metz graduated from Bowling Green State University and earned an MA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1960. During 1966 and 1967 she studied at Atelier 17 in Paris. Her teaching career includes Phoenix College, Arizona; New York University; College of St. Benedict; St. Joseph, Minnesota; University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of California, Santa Cruz for twenty-one years. Among many fellowships and awards was that of a residence fellowship at MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.