Willoughby Elliott

ARTIST PROFILE

Artana wishes to congratulate Willoughby Elliott on his current retrospective exhibition:

Light, Space and Atmosphere: A Spiritual Journey
Willoughby Elliott Retrospective

The exhibition is sponsored and hosted by the New Bedford Art Museum (NBAM). Since 1996, NBAM has played an important role in highlighting significant South Coast artists' work as well as internationally known talent. Severin (Sig) Haines curated this dynamic collection of Elliott's work.

Elliott's retrospective is on view at the Museum through January 21, 2012.

Artana's Director, Heather Roy, hopes that you will visit this noteworthy regional museum (located only 60 miles from Boston) to witness firsthand Elliott's professional journey as both print maker and painter. It is a very impressive and substantial show (approximately 60 works beautifully displayed in a historic setting) and one that should not be missed!

For more information on Elliott's exhibition or availability of paintings, please contact Heather Roy at 617-879-3111 or roy@artanagallery.com.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am inspired by the complex and varied atmospheric effects that occur when a moisture-laden sky is affected by light. The coastal environment can seem at times primordial because of how the basic elements of land, sea, sky and light interact with one another. There is a natural rhythm and balance created by the instability of this interaction. I think of nature as a verb, not a noun because of the continuing changes that occur. I relate to the way color can be made to suggest a dominant expressive light, defining a space within each of my paintings. This light, while stable, is always on the verge of changing. Sometimes the titles may suggest a specific place or time of day, morning or evening. Indeed most of the work is derived from a specific location. These sites become transformed into images of the imagination where light conditions are depicted that could exist but really don't. The paintings are idealizations, and are sometimes threatening spaces that some how inform us about our origins and our relation to the natural world.

In transforming the landscape, I use layers of color, shapes and marks that work in an abstract way to create a feeling. In fact, the abstractness of the work and its sense of space is intended to create a spiritual resonance within the viewer. I'm not interested in the things in the landscape. The subject matter is only there to serve the space. In some of my paintings, the subject could easily dissolve. I'm more interested in the abstract language that configures the space itself.

Many of my paintings have been of salt marshes, my more recent work has moved in the direction of depicting trees or tree groupings in the space. The work continues to be concerned with abstraction and the expression of the tree shapes as the light and mood affect them.