Neumann Fine Art to Feature Joel Griffith, Painter Laureate of Tivoli, in Solo Exhibition

'House on West Kerley' by Joel Griffith

‘House on West Kerley’ by Joel Griffith

(HILLSDALE, N.Y.) –  Oil paintings by Joel Griffith will be displayed at Neumann Fine Art  (65 Cold Water St) from November 9, 2013, through January 4, 2014. A reception and gallery talk by the artist will take place on Saturday, November 30, at 5pm.

Joel Griffith was named the official Painter Laureate of his hometown of Tivoli, N.Y., in 2003. His paintings, many of which grace the walls of Tivoli’s Town Hall, “are like a great story told at the local bar by a profound poet with a visionary eye,” said Bard College associate professor Tim Davis in an essay on Griffith’s work.

Griffith received his BA from Grinnell College in 1996. He studied painting at Lacoste Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France in 1998 and earned his MFA at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of Art in 2003. He was honored with a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant in 2005. Griffith was the featured cover artist and the subject of a short film produced by Stephen Blauweiss for Chonogram Magazine in July 2013. This show of 10 oil paintings at Neumann Fine Art will be the artist’s eighth solo exhibition.

Joel GriffithProfessor Davis further states that Griffith’s paintings are  “closer to Goya than Grant Wood, employing the purest of descriptive technique to talk about a feeling in the air, the hum from a power line, true sentiment rather than mere description.”

“Joel Griffith’s deeply felt and meticulously executed Hudson Valley landscapes and nocturnes are produced with the consummate painting skill learned from study of the Old Masters, but painted with the fresh and unflinchingly sharp eye of a 21st Century realist. Painted on-site from direct observation rather than photo-referenced, his work is at once classic and contemporary. More than just formally and technically excellent; the work has great soul,” says gallery director Jeffrey L. Neumann.

Neumann Fine Art is open Thursday – Sunday  11 – 4 and by appointment. Tel : 413-246-5776.

 

 

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