Bruce Garrity, Recent Work at 3rd Street Gallery, Old City, Philadelphia
Bruce Garrity‘s life long affair with art is passionate and romantic. Like Jean-Antoine Watteau the natural world is lush and colorful, surprises and mysteries in the forest. Each color is all colors, the brushwork layers paint in concentrated tones of color. Paul Cezanne comes to mind, too, when observing Garrity’s artwork, the geometry of the landscape has layers of information in color and hue in a masterful way. The large painting of the bathers is unforgettable, the figures populate the landscape in a powerful, one of the faces is just a swirl. The references to influencers is authentic and heartening expressing emotion, feelings and imagination.
Bruce Garrity, Recent Work, 3rd Street Gallery, photo Jeff Stroud
“I have these two photographs and the fact is I like the way people interacted with the painting, they walked right up to them, the took selfies as close as they could to be part of the painting. The guy in front of the large bathers was walking back and forth in intellectual conversation about the piece.” – Jeff Stroud
Bruce Garrity, Recent Work, 3rd Street Gallery, photo Jeff Stroud
“Garrity’s poetic figurative paintings utilize a broad vocabulary of painterly means in the pursuit of visual drama. The surfaces of the works range from light washes, direct drawing, scumbles and layerings to heavy impastos of the mostly saturated color palette. Garrity draws on various methods of construction, to bring the works to fruition: direct perception, memory, invention and combinations of these. The paintings, some as large as eight by 10 feet, depict figures and objects life size at the picture plane so one feels they can be entered and engaged directly. They are autobiographical of interests over a long period of time.” – Bruce Garrity
Garrity received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from the University of Delaware, and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He teaches at Rutgers University in Camden.
Today is the last day of the show at 3rd Street Gallery due to the Papal visit.
Read the DoNArTNeWs interview with Bruce Garrity
Bruce Garrity, an Artist in Good Company, John Thornton Films
“Bruce Garrity paints very colorful and dynamic still lives, portraiots, nudes, and reimagines some of the great works by Post Impressionist artists like Cezanne and early Modernists like Matisse. After growing up in Alaska, Bruce eventually found himself teaching art at Rutgers University.” – John Thornton Films
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