Susan Street Fine Art Gallery Presents Tender Rivers
Susan Street Fine Art Gallery presents Tender Rivers, featuring Stephen Pentak and Bob Nugent, whose paintings focus on the beauty of some of nature’s most vulnerable places—forgotten river landscapes trapped between busy highways and the Amazon rainforest, both teeming with life and vitality.
Experiences while fly-fishing around the world have provided a captivating source for Stephen Pentak’s rivers and broadwater paintings since 1991. Connecting us with places known and unknown, the artist pushes landscape painting beyond conventional realism. The saturated surfaces of his oils evoke memories of the pristine American landscape but on inspection it is clear that Pentak is a late 20th century painter, deftly personalizing the lessons of modernism. Abstracted from the artist’s interest in rivers and old growth sycamores escaping urban development, the compositions are arranged as conversations between the landscape and the roads that confine it.
California painter Bob Nugent is one of the few contemporary artists documenting the Amazon rainforest—a calling that has occupied him for the past 24 years. Naturalistic forms resembling beehives, vertebrae, and plant forms are spread across the surface of his work using a subdued palette. The artist leaves fields of unpainted exposed linen that become integral to the aesthetics and to the power of the piece. By visiting the region two or three times a year, Nugent has become attuned to its many moods. His paintings evoke memories of objects and impressions of what was seen and felt along this great river bound on both sides by a high, dark jungle, both foreboding and beautiful.
For many centuries in Western art, it has been the artists who have led the public to appreciate the beauty and vulnerability of the nature around them. One wonders what we might have lost in the past if not for their efforts to preserve the marvels of nature. Contemporary artists like Pentak and Nugent, with their sublime depictions of abstracted nature, continue this important tradition to make us pause and reflect on what we might lose in the future if we do not guard these treasures.
Tender Rivers runs September 17th – November 19th, 2009. An artist reception will take place on Thursday, September 17th, from 6-9 pm, in conjunction with A Fall Affair; fall in love with Cedros Street Festival. For further inquiries, please contact the gallery at: www.susanstreetfineart.com / 858-793-4442. 415 So. Cedros Ave, Solana Beach, Ca, 92075.
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