Event
Gregory Kondos | Transcendent LandscapesPost an Event »
Caldwell Snyder Gallery
June 20 - July 20, 2015Info
341 Sutter Street San Francisco, CA 94108 Google Map »Reception
June 20, 2015 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Blue Vineyard, 96 x 60 inches, oil on canvas
Gregory Kondos | Transcendent Landscapes
Gregory Kondos has spent decades depicting California’s unique, majestic beauty, from its rolling farmland to its varied coastline, to the forests and peaks of Yosemite, where he has often served as artist-in-residence. He has been drawn as well to the deserts around Santa Fe, and to Europe, especially Greece, the country from which his parents emigrated. Now in his nineties, he is celebrated as one of the world’s foremost landscape painters, known for his light-filled palette and intuitive, organic forms that seem like effortless extensions of nature.
Kondos describes his paintings as possessing a sense of quietude and cleanliness while maintaining a necessary lonely quality: “Less is more...and what is left out makes the picture more understandable.” His distilled images tend to feature a solitary element—a lone boat, a mountain peak, a house standing away from the others—that projects a contemplative sense of being alone in thought. His simple yet lively palette and elegant lines, influenced by artists like Willem de Kooning, Cezanne, and Gauguin, allow us to place ourselves within the space of the painting. Chief curator and associate director at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, Scott A. Shields, who organized “A Touch of Blue: Landscapes by Gregory Kondos” at the museum in 2013, remarks: “His paintings simultaneously celebrate the terrain’s inherent formal, abstract properties, as well as the beautiful possibilities of the paint itself.”