Olga Antonova, Sandra Pratt, Ruth Williams & Robin Winfield Show Opens
The Rice Polak Gallery is excited to announce our fifth feature exhibition of the 2024 season. We will be exhibiting the work of Olga Antonova, Sandra Pratt, Ruth Williams & Robin Winfield.
The show previews on Thursday August 29th and runs through Wednesday September 11. The Opening Reception is on Friday August 30 beginning at 7pm. Please join us at the gallery for this exciting exhibition.
OLGA ANTONOVA
Still life painter and artist, Olga Antonova has built an international reputation with major exhibitions in Europe as well as the States. The Russian-born painter, trained at the prestigious Repin Painting Institute, has enchanted art collectors with her finely-rendered yet whimsically romantic still lifes and self portraits. Like the great European painters of the early 18th century, Antonova has the gift of taking ordinary subjects from everyday life and elevating them to the level of high art. Using simple compositions and monumental scale, she presents her subjects with loving care and romantic vision, enhancing and complimenting them with decorative borders that imbue them with a heroic grandeur.
“For me, it’s not about the subject matter at all — subject matter is just a pretext for my execution and sensitivity to technical issues. I want to catch that moment of solitude, that quiet harmony that people can relate to. That’s what I’m after.”
SANDRA PRATT
Sandra Pratt ‘s landscapes and village scenes explore a potential for comfort in open, even barren spaces. The sparse compositions present a countryside that is safely isolated from industry and technology. The personal and emotional nature of Pratt’s work is influenced by her self-taught approach to working with composition, oil paint, and the palette knife. Her panels and canvases are decisively developed in bold, confident shapes of thick saturated earth tone colors. The places Pratt paints into being possess age and history as well as a particular charm from being well used and needed.
“Through painting, I communicate my inner world, it is a medium through which I can express innermost thoughts, feelings, and insights, enabling viewers to experience a sense of enlightenment and connection that transcends the mundane. It allows me to navigate the complexities of my inner world, capturing moments of joy, sorrow, and everything in between. With each stroke of the brush, I unravel a part of myself, expressing what words cannot articulate.”
RUTH WILLIAMS
“My work this season continues to pull me towards that which mesmerizes and inspires- the powerful, multidimensional, unapologetic and at times flamboyant faces of nature, if my paintings transport the viewer from the place where they are to a place that ignites a memory or a longing I consider myself successful. I bring the outside in and hope to make that a palpable experience for the observer.”
Ruth Williams captures in her paintings her powerful reactions to the landscape and colors of nature. “Once completed, a painting is no longer about what I felt while creating it but rather it becomes about what the piece evokes in the viewer”. Over the last two decades, along with a treasured career as a School Counselor and private psychotherapist, Ruth has been pursuing painting, developing the craft, while exploring ideas of importance to her.
ROBIN WINFIELD
Photographer and artist Robin Winfield continues her quest to find beauty in the mundane – in walls of cobbled bricks or crumbling stucco, old faded signs and freshly painted walls, the myriad of colors in mosses and molds, the architectural details from ancient to modern day designs. Often the central focus is on ‘the doorway,’ though universally similar in function, it can be incredibly diverse in form. Most of the doorways she photographs are closed or blocked, leaving the viewer to create the world beyond. A photo trip to France last September offered up a wealth of these characteristics which will be displayed in this season’s show.
“When describing my work and the process I use, two words come to mind: structure and balance. In structuring a piece, I begin with a realistic focus – the photograph – and use this as a vehicle to express a mood or an aspect of the human condition. Then, by extending the colors and the textures found in the photograph, I can create a world from my own imagination, the results bordering on the surreal.”
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.
