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“Beauty and Terror”
Dacia Gallery:
53 Stanton St, New York, NY 10002.
Opening Reception
Thursday, May 2, 2019 6-9pm
Mother’s Day Tea
Sunday May 12 3-5pm. Tea and cookies!
Closing Jazz Concert:
Thursday May 16 7-9pm. “Piazzolla Tango, Accordian and Flute!”
Harbinger, 2019, oil on linen, 40 x 26 inches
Patricia Watwood’s New Solo Show “Beauty and Terror” will be on view at Dacia Gallery in New York City
from April 29 to May 17, 2019.
This new body of figurative paintings explores the human cycles of struggle,
striving and transformation, and the beauty and terror experienced along the way.
Icarus, 2019, oil on linen, 26 x 36 inches.
About the show:
This new body of figurative paintings explores the human cycles of struggle, striving and transformation, and the beauty and terror experienced along the way. This work has been created over a turbulent period of my life, and reflects in metaphor my own journey through trial, limitation, growth and recommitment.
It feels to me that the whole world is in the middle of a critical time of opportunity, anxiety and crisis-- writ large on a planetary level, and infinitely small in the affairs of the heart. In my new paintings, prophets, caryatids, lonely heroes, fleshy humans, and sensual dreamers are all part of the cast of this drama where we strive to understand ourselves, transcend the known world, and create a new one--but sometimes crash in trying.
Skies and seas swirl with smoke and debris, signaling the fragility of the human souls within. Prophets and omens call us to transformation. Beauty and terror herein evoke not a “Golden Age,” but perhaps the end of the human game. In painting the body, I celebrate the mystery of the material embodiment of consciousness.
Our human flesh is the vessel that carries all our hopes and dreams, genius, lust, rationality, instinct, insight, sadness, and joy. Walt Whitman calls the body the “gates of the soul,” and asserts, “If life and soul are sacred the human body is sacred.” Painting the nude, women, the body, the breast, are a way for me to delve into the mystery of “what are we,” and “who are we?” Is the beauty of this fragile body and human consciousness enough to motivate
us to transform our lives and live sustainably with the planet?
In this set of paintings, I played with the brushwork, level of detail, abstract geometries, and expressiveness of the handling. My aim was to open up the metaphoric range and evoke the freedom of 20th century
painting to complement my affinity for representational figuration.
Fallen Caryatid, 2019, oil on linen, 36 x 24 inches.
End of Days, 2019, oil on linen, 44 x 36 inches
Avatar, 2018 oil on linen, 40 x 26 inches
Ascending, 2019, oil on linen, 54 x 48 inches.
