Craig Mooney, Joshua Meyer & Lainard Bush Show Opens
The Rice Polak Gallery is excited to announce our first feature exhibition of the 2024 season is now open. We will be exhibiting the work of Craig Mooney, Joshua Meyer & Lainard Bush. The show previewed on Thursday July 4th and runs through Wednesday July 17th.
We also had another very special reception on Friday July 5th at the Mary Heaton Vorse House. Click here to see the video of the show “The 3 Amigos.” You can see the full Rice Polak Gallery summer exhibition schedule here.
CRAIG MOONEY
Craig Mooney is known for painting dramatic cityscapes, skies and seascapes with a cinematic sense of mystery. Craig makes paintings of dramatic moments and heightened emotionality that are known for being expansive and expressive. He incorporates a myriad of abstract qualities throughout his work and his paintings appear to be capturing a moment suspended in time. Born and raised in the heart of midtown Manhattan, Mooney’s roots in art go back to his youth. His father, an amateur artist, taught him how to create oil paintings from discarded art supplies found on city streets, the city supplying an endless source of inspiration and artistic training.
“My work is a form of impressionism with a contemporary bent,” said Craig Mooney. “These paintings come from a reality that never existed but is instantly recognizable. The work is purposefully ambiguous, and details are generally left out. I use brushes and pallet knives to build form, gesture and color into my paintings, imbuing them with a cinematic quality.”
JOSHUA MEYER
Joshua Meyer is known for his thickly layered paintings of people, and for a searching, open-ended process. He paints his subjects over long stretches of time, and his figure paintings have lingered between order and chaos. His energetic swipes of paint are layered with a palette knife and reveal the artistic process while involving the viewer in each artistic decision along the way. Meyer has been recognized with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and twice with the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Painting Fellowship.
“I paint people over long stretches of time by building up thick impasto,” said Joshua. “These exposed layers of paint invite the audience into my creative process. Each daub holds a memory, and when they overlap, you can see time elapse. I try to immerse the viewer in my process—I want you to feel what it is like to be making the painting. This format allows my paintings to tell stories about how we change and how we reconcile multiple, competing truths.”
LAINARD BUSH
Lainard Bush is a painter whose work has a kinship with the tradition of sacred geometry. He explores concepts such as pattern, order, and the infinite variety of life. His paintings blend abstraction with a sense of panoramic scope, combining Eastern and Western sensibilities to convey an intuition of order and pattern while also celebrating the beauty of the individual and discrete.
“I create paintings because of an obsessive need to give expression to the idea of infinite beauty and the mystery of being,” said artist Lainard Bush. “This need arises from my experience of the joy and wonder of this world. My work has a kinship with the tradition of sacred geometry. Process is central to the work. It is a kind of alchemy: I combine the elemental, formal aspects of abstraction, which includes experimenting, inventing, exploring and exercising my powers of observation and analysis.” Click here to see a video of Lainard Bush’s extraordinary painting process.
The gallery is now open daily, Thursday, Friday & Saturday evenings, online and of course by appointment. Please visit our website where you now purchase artwork directly online. And if you are in town this Friday please stop by the gallery and experience this wonderful show in person.
