Ann Korologos Gallery presents Nature’s Narratives, a group exhibition showcasing painter Peter Campbell, watercolorist Katie DeGroot, and mixed media artist Allison Stewart. A master of his or her own medium, each artist applies skill and imagination as commentary on the beauty, destruction, and personification of the natural world. Nature’s Narratives is on view at Ann Korologos Gallery in Basalt, CO from January 13 to 31, 2024.
“Nature’s Narratives is a personal dialogue between each artist, the landscape and the viewer, exploring the natural world and it’s interactions with our own humanity,” reflects gallery director, Sue Edmonds. “Peter Campbell depicts emotions elicited by a landscape with the vibrancy of a dream; Katie DeGroot playfully personifies and reimagines fallen branches in decay collected from the woods of New York as a new life; Allison Stewart processes love and grief of life and landscape, celebrating moments of breath and creation, mourning change and loss.”
Peter Campbell is a Durango-based artist whose landscape paintings are abstracted views of nature, a perspective informed by his photographic background. The ideas for Campbell’s landscape oil paintings are often sparked by a fleeting glimpse that catches his eye and elicits an intimate and personal reaction to nature. By limiting his palette and omitting details, Campbell effectively creates an atmosphere, a mood, sometimes a fantasy which is open to each viewer’s interpretation. The artist works on location, connecting directly with the landscape to bring, as he says, the outside into a painting, imbuing it with elements that make it alive.
Katie DeGroot is a New York-based artist whose watercolor paintings explore the contrast of growth and decay, surrealism and abstraction, nature and form. Using branches as an observational starting point, the painter responds within the language of contemporary painting. Decaying branches and trees festooned by lichens, moss and mushrooms find new life in the studio of Katie DeGroot, reimagined and personified as a group of gossip girls walking down the street, of dancers, or sleeping couples. Her work is informed by Gladys Niilson, Alice Neel, Giorgio Morandi, Henri Matisse, Charles Burchfield, Barbara Takenaga, and others.
Allison Stewart shares her time between New Orleans, LA and Snowmass, CO. Her nature-based abstract paintings reflect the duality of substance and spirit, image and impression, observation and memory. Stewart’s mixed media works on canvas or paper are inspired by stories of restoration, cultivation, and conservation in both the natural world and her life in stories that often intersect. Stewart paints abstract visual diaries of her emotions about a landscape, about nature in the act of becoming, nature in the act of changing, of altering itself or being altered.
Nature’s Narratives featuring Peter Campbell, Katie DeGroot and Allison Stewart will remain on view through January 31, 2024. For more information, please visit Ann Korologos Gallery at 211 Midland Avenue in Basalt, call (970) 927-9668 or email art@korologosgallery.com.
