Melissa Gwyn–Awesome Painter and Professor at UCSC

Melissa Gwyn, Untitled, 2010

Melissa Gwyn, “The Late Faberge,” 2007, oil on wood

Melissa Gwyn

“Melissa Gwyn’s work was recently featured in a traveling group exhibition organized by the Tang Museum at Skidmore College. She’s has had one person shows at Feigen Contemporary, Stux Gallery, White Columns in New York, the Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin, and group shows in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, London and   Japan. Her work has been reviewed in Art Forum, Time Out, Village Voice, Art News, New York Times, Arts Magazine, Chemistry World and other publications. Gwyn currently teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her core practice is oil painting. Gwyn’s abstract and image-based paintings reference the excess materiality of 1950’s American Abstract Expressionists, the verisimilitude of 17th century Dutch still-life painting and the opulence of artists associated with late 19th century decadence such as Gustave Moreau.

For this show Gwyn is exhibiting two oil paintings in addition to twelve watercolor and gouache sketches she created while traveling in Nepal and Indonesia. These works, begun in 2006 and most completed in 2010 represent a departure from her oil practice. In these paintings Gwyn comes to terms with the relative permanence of the mark in water medium, a contrast from the greasy malleability of oil paint. In each abstract sketch flows of watery puddles merge with broken bits and skins of pigment and renderings of agglomerating organic life.” -Link to this quote is in the first image