Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to present
Betsy Eby: Of this natural world, her first solo
exhibition at the gallery. The public is invited to
attend an opening reception for the artist on
September 26, 5-7pm, and the show will run through November 2nd.
Betsy Eby’s encaustic paintings are infused with a unique sensibility informed by the
artist’s Pacific Northwest heritage, her concerns for nature and a lifelong classical piano
practice. Using trowels, knives, brushes and heat, Eby pours and spreads hot and cold
natural wax-based paint onto on panel, layering gestures to create nuanced marks
across the surface. The paintings in this exhibition are inspired by the wilderness of
nature and the way in which the natural world serves as a tonic for the human spirit.
Created in her Maine summer retreat, Eby’s new body of work captures the music and
rhythms portrayed in nature: the lulling of waves, the fragrance of the sea air, resinous
bay berries, blueberries, honey suckle in the breeze…. all have their own sound and
melodies that speak to the artist. “There is musical accompaniment in nature”, the artist
states.
Eby savors nature holistically, poetically depicting the essence of the verdant and
granite landscape against the backdrop of a shimmering coastline, using abstraction to
fuse that which animates her senses. Like notes shimmering on a page, the paintings
are soft gestures akin to ascending scales, glissandos or arpeggiations within ambient-
like sound beds. The marks on Ravel, glyphs fleeting across the surface within and
through atmospheric grounds, came from listening to the composer in the background
as she worked in the studio. Eby’s work synthesizes and distills all that surrounds her,
intuitively harnessing and conveying her environment on the panel. Setting Eby’s new
paintings apart from previous series are the grounds, which at first glance appear more
neutral but are informed with a shifting colored nuance. The artist finds herself with a
more atuned sensory input of late, and this is evident in her most recent work.
“I make nature based, abstract paintings that convey the musical frequencies of an
ecologically balanced, natural world unspoiled by human encroachment. They are
meditations on undisrupted skies, habitats and oceans, calling attention to the natural
rhythms of our environment and the elements and our interconnectedness within them”.
Eby received her B.A. from the University of Oregon and splits her time between her
studios in Columbus, Georgia and Wheaton Island in Maine. She has been the subject
of numerous solo and group exhibitions and her work forms part of many important
private, corporate and public collections including the Columbus Museum and the
Georgia Museum of Art in Georgia; the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington; and the Art
in Embassies in Gambia, Brunei, Dubai and Papua New Guinea.
