Paul Garland: Intuitive Progression is a selective survey of the artist’s work from throughout his long and influential career. In his ongoing experimentation with color and shape, Garland has used watercolor, acrylic, photography, as well as paint-stick and scrap wood to create evocative, multilayered abstractions on paper and canvas. His intuition guides his hand toward an immediately recognizable style characterized by a deceptively simple balance between colorful void and rigid geometry, with each new series building upon the aesthetic developments of the last.
Garland began with non-objective abstraction before dedicating himself to naturalistic landscapes inspired by the environment that surrounds his studio in Fair Haven, NY. Recently, he has combined his interests in abstraction and landscape in a series appropriately titled “Junctures.” Ranging from large-scale color field works on paper to small assemblages of painted wood and canvas, this exhibition features examples of work from every period of his career.
Whether inspired by local landscape, travel, new technologies, or the art of 19th-century English Romanticist J. M. W. Turner, Paul Garland, as he approaches his 55th year as a practicing artist, continues to experiment and to renew his artistic process while maintaining a singular technique of happenstance and intuition.
About the Artist
For over 50 years, Paul Garland (b. 1943) has influenced generations of local artists through his teaching career at SUNY Oswego, while consistently evolving in his craft. Beginning in the late 1960s, Garland experimented with large-scale abstract works created solely on the artist’s instinct, without purposeful planning or forethought. This process of intuition has carried through Garland’s work ever since.
After receiving his MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Garland began teaching art at SUNY Oswego, while pursuing his artistic practice in his studio in Fair Haven, NY. He has traveled extensively and at different times has had studios in New York City and London. His solo exhibitions include those at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, the Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto, the New York Institute of Technology in Westbury, NY, and at AXOM Gallery in Rochester. His work in included in the permanent collections of various museum, corporate, and university collections including the Everson Museum of Art, the Memorial Art Gallery, the IBM Corporation, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
To contact the artist, please email him at paulgarlandart@gmail.com.