Mark Sublette of Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, Arizona, has selected four young artists for the gallery’s next show, New Young Guns. The exhibition is a sequel to Young Guns, the 2013 exhibition that featured the then-rising stars Glenn Dean, Josh Elliott and Logan Maxwell Hagege.
The three painters and a sculptor live in the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest and each, in his or her own way, respond to the various qualities of light.
Jordan K. Walker, Mojave Morning, oil on linen panel, 24 x 36 in.
Josh Gibson, who hails from Tucson, observes, “The sparseness of the desert is where the light goes to play. Every day it operates under new conditions. The sky and clouds act like prisms and the light shifts through every hue imaginable.” Hiking through the desert and in the mountains provides a constant boost to his creative energy.“Design is central to the painting Wisdom of the Light,” he explains. “It’s a piece that is both very graphic and full of depth. The title is indicative of the silent wisdom of nature. Go outside and you can feel it all around you—complex natural systems working seamlessly at infinitely large and small scale.
Whitney Gardner, A Place Called Home, oil on linen panel, 36 x 36 in.
Camping in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California, where Mount Whitney and the Sierra range dominate the western horizon, Jordan K. Walker happened to look east one morning, and “was greeted by one of the most mesmerizing displays I’ve ever seen.”
“Mojave Morningis a celebration of sunrise in an otherworldly desert landscape,” Walker says. “The crisp, arid atmosphere of this region allows for a clarity and intensity of light that is impossible to find in more humid environments.”
Josh Gibson, Taming the Dust, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in.
Walker grew up in the humid environment in Rhode Island and now lives in Oregon, where he explores the landscapes of the West.
“On this brisk spring dawn,” he says, “a bank of clouds near the horizon were set afire from below, creating a striking contrast against the cool tones of the rocks that had not yet been greeted by the light of the sun…This painting in particular has taken me furthest outside my comfort zone, as the entire foreground and all of the major rock formations are completely engulfed in shadow. The main point of interest in the composition comes from the interplay of these dark silhouettes against a highly saturated, dramatic sky. It was an exciting challenge to bring interest and variety to the boulder strewn landscape without drawing too much attention away from the glowing clouds.”
Light animates Maeve Eichelberger’s hand-formed acrylic saddle sculpture Tropicana.The Colorado native had been constructing three-dimensional collages when she became captivated by the forms of the leather saddles, chaps and other items in the tack room of her father’s barn. She remembered a piece of Plexiglass she had left out in the sun and how it had begun to warp—and the idea to take the form of a saddle, simplify it and assemble it in acrylic was born. Since the acrylic doesn’t bend like leather, she has abstracted the forms in her work.
Maeve Eichelberger, Tropicana, hand-formed acrylic, 27 x 15 x 13 in.
Many of her saddles are etched with intricate patterns, stopping the eye on a surface before it sees through to the next. She says, “I create multiple layers of experience that demonstrate the significance of observing life both sequentially and simultaneously.”
On Tropicana, “each rose and vine was hand formed and bent to climb the saddle,” she explains. “I left this saddle form in clear to emphasize the roses and change our point of view. I’m pretty excited about this experiment. I haven’t played like this in a while, and it feels great!”
Oil painter Whitney Gardner takes viewers back to the Mojave Desert. In her studio she works with plein air sketches, photographs and memories to create her evocative paintings.
Jordan K. Walker, Valley of Fire, oil on linen panel, 24 x 36 in.
A Place Called Home is a view of the Sheephole Mountain Range not far from the where lives as a resident artist at Wonder Lake Ranch in the appropriately named Wonder Valley. Her long familiarity with the area has allowed her to absorb the landscape and to be aware of its constant changes.
“The landscape here has been my muse for over a year now as I have made many paintings of the same ridge lines, creosote bush and sand, but in changing light and weather that I have observed in my time here,” she says. “The views depicted in my paintings are the same view from my cabin and studio. It is what I wake up to, what I gaze upon in between painting breaks throughout the day, and what I study as the sun lowers and the stars come out. I have lived in the Mojave for 14 years, and the landscape always feels alive and new to me because conditions and weather allow the desert to be constantly changing. And the weather here is an event. Whether it is monsoon season with curtains of rainfall miles in the distance, rare snowfall in winter, dust storms in any season or 120 degrees in summer, there’s always some thing to marvel at or complain about.
Josh Gibson, Wisdom of the Light, oil on linen, 30 x 60 in.
“In A Place Called Home, there is a tiny homestead cabin painted in the distance, right at the horizon line at the base of the mountain. There are actually many of these abandoned cabins in my view from the ranch that litter the landscape. I usually leave out these structures from my paintings but I added a little cabin to this painting to create a sense of scale and a human presence to the composition. Also, the little cabin gives me a personal sense of place. Almost as a way of documenting my time here, the painting hints at how I live in a small dwelling surrounded by a vast desert, subject to the power of nature. This place, I call home. For now.”
New Young Guns opens November 15 with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. —
Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery 6872 E. Sunrise Drive, Suite #130 » Tucson, AZ 85750 (520) 722-7798 » www.medicinemangallery.com
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