Eleanor Sackett
Rhetorical Realms
November 23 - December 14, 2010
Reception:
Thursday December 2, 2010 6-8 PM
Press Release
New York City native Eleanor Sackett paints portraits with arresting visual and emotional frankness. She cites the influence of John Singer Sargent, a distant relation, and the likeness is hard to miss: both are spectacularly agile at establishing a setting while focusing our vision intensely on the sitters’ faces. Though Sackett never strives for meticulous hyperrealism, there is something discernibly photographic in the poses, expressions, and varying sharpness of focus of subjects in her oil canvases. “I am trying to paint what I see,” she writes, “However I am not interested in photo realism. As I paint I am thinking about what I like in the face.”
Each work activates a specific feature in the sitter, whether the calm Cubism of a man’s sharp chin, or the diffuse Impressionistic tufts of hair on another’s head. She guides our eyes to meet theirs through subtle shifts in the sharpness and finesse of her brushstrokes, lending even her most excitable young subjects incredible airs of poise and self-reflection.
Artist Statement
Much as I love landscape and still life painting, it is the face that interests me most. No face can be improved upon, and I am always aware of this important fact, so I try for the best likeness I am capable of, holistically rendered in natural light. The light is particularly vital to my painting process, because it plays a special role - it both illuminates and casts in shadow, "creating lost and found", as the face and figure in places become one with the background. This creates interest, immediacy, and beauty.
Invitation to the exhibition
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Artists in this exhibition
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