Past Show:
Mimo Gordon Riley

Some images are cropped; click on the thumbnail for the full image.

Windbreak, oil on canvas, 24x20
Understory, oil on canvas, 48x42
Split Second, oil on canvas, 24x24
Separate from Matter, oil on canvas, 40x24
Private Matter, oil on canvas, 24x24
Out of Reach, oil on canvas, 24x24
It's Gonna be a Day, oil on canvas, 24x24
Hoping, oil on canvas, 24x24
Free Wheeling, oil on canvas, 24x24
Fertile Ground, oil on canvas, 24x24
Family Trees 36, oil on canvas, 72x72
Breking Loose, oil on canvas, 24x24
Aerial Boogie, oil on canvas, 36x36

MIMO GORDON RILEY
Entering
July 1 – July 30, 2011
Artist’s Reception, Friday, July 1, 5 – 8

We are delighted to present our first solo show of  the season with Mimo Gordon Riley’s exhibition of recent paintings.  Mimo, a New England native and member of an extensive and noted family in the arts, spends long summers in Tenants Harbor.  “I have been coming to Maine my whole life,” says the artist.  “Maine is very much in my core.”  Following early art training at Boston’s Museum School, Mimo enrolled in the Portland (Maine) School of Art at the age of 38, and spent four years there, earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.  She now lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, when not in Maine, and exhibits throughout the Northeast.

Artist’s Statement

Trees are much more grounded than we are.  They throw their roots well down into the uncharted territory of the unconscious, while their trunks and branches rise jubilantly to the heavens.

At our house, we have planted many new young saplings; some bought at considerable expense, some dug up carefully and transplanted…maples, willows, birches, lilacs, evergreens, a peach, an apple, a black gum, and a katsura.  Some are spindly and lose limbs during the winter or get bugs during the summer, and others thrive from day one.  We love them all.  We nurture them and watch them carefully for new growth, make sure they have enough to eat and drink, and a healthy place with enough sun and shade to grow.

Like children, we can admire many from afar, but then want a few to bring home and call our own.  And also like children, after early care, they grow, take their own shape and make their own way in the world.

I have been painting trees for about four years now, some from observation, some from memory and some from, what can I say, my soul.  I have experimented with various ways to make them mine: color, shapes, intensity, contrast.  I don’t plan.  I simply start and they emerge.  I push them back and they come out in another place, and then after that happens a few times, we meet in a kind of truce between what I think I want to paint and what they seem to want to be.

Mimo Gordon Riley
July 1, 2011