LATE LIGHT: Willard Dixon - Online Exclusive
LATE LIGHT
Willard Dixon, new paintings
online exclusive exhibition
February 19 — March 31, 2024
Andra Norris Gallery is honored to present Late Light, an online exclusive exhibition featuring fourteen new Willard Dixon paintings, each celebrating the golden hour and its late light. *A selection of the work is on view in the gallery.
Willard Dixon was born in Kansas City MO. 1942. He has shown extensively in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and has had over 40 one-man shows. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Oakland Museum of California Art. He has executed large-scale commissions for the California Supreme Court, The Oakland Museum, and the Las Vegas Federal Courthouse, and received an NEA Fellowship Grant in 1989. Willard Dixon’s art is collected Internationally.
Artist Statement:
With the perspective afforded as my practice of painting moves well into its fifth decade, I have occasion to reflect on what common spirit might be running through the work, underlying the different approaches and subject matter that have emerged over the years. What I perceive most clearly in the successful work is a sense of presence or aliveness, and a “rightness” of form scale and color. Somehow through luck, hard work, or some combination of the two, I’ve been able to find and draw these qualities out of the paint. In my landscapes, that can be achieved through a certain evocation of space and light. In the still lifes, by a concentration on composition and scale and reduction to essentials, and now in my portraits, engaging similar means in the service of conjuring a human presence. Through it all I’ve learned to accept and enjoy the impossibility of having more than a momentary resting place before moving on to another attempt. I do appreciate more and more the way a painting, its spirit arising out of such humble materials, continues to rest silently on the wall, contemplating both itself and the viewer amidst the hurried buzz of our contemporary lives, offering refuge and occasion for those desiring a deeper and more satisfying engagement of our attention.
A selection of paintings are currently hanging in the galley.
For more information, please contact Andra Norris.