Exhibition Feature - THE BEAUTY OF SOLITUDE at Adah Rose Gallery
Quilt Show, 2021 - Acrylic and Graphite on Wood, 5 × 7 in, 12.7 × 17.8 cm - by Emily Pettigrew
Adah Rose Gallery in Kensington, Maryland is pleased to present The Beauty of Solitude - artists Nathan Mullins and Emily Pettigrew explore the beauty of solitude in figurative paintings that are imbued with a sense of silence and quiet heroics. The exhibition will be on view through March 2, 2022.
GALLERY STATEMENT - Emily Pettigrew and Nathan Mullins each respond to the concept of solitude and the heroics of ordinary lives in their figurative paintings. Emily’s body of work melds history with her everyday life to recreate the feeling of timelessness she so often experiences while living and working in the Catskill mountains. Nathan Mullins’ paintings share a theme of timelessness as well as a deep sense of mythology. Nathan lives and works in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Emily Pettigrew:
Red Bedroom, 2021 - Acrylic on Wood, 16 × 20 in, 40.6 × 50.8 cm
At the Back Stair, 2021 - Acrylic and Graphite on Wood, 18 × 24 in, 45.7 × 61 cm
Thoughts on The Beauty of Solitude by Emily Pettigrew:
My second solo show, The Beauty of Solitude, is a collection of spare but expansive paintings made over the last several years. This body of work melds history with my everyday life to recreate the feeling of timelessness I so often experience while living and working in the Catskill mountains.
It is this peaceful but also slightly eerie “Rip Van Winkle-esque” blurring of past and present that I search for when I go out looking for subjects for my paintings. I most often use myself, my partner, and his children as subjects and places I have been as scenes. In these paintings, I aim to remove the excesses and more prosaic aspects of modern life while leaving a crystallization of what is meaningful and timeless.
Home Worship, 2021 - Acrylic and Graphite on Panel, 20 × 16 in, 50.8 × 40.6 cm
Over the Wall, Meridale, ca. 2021 - Acrylic and Graphite on Wood, 24 × 30 in, 61 × 76.2 cm
Nathan Mullins:
Par Lane, 2021 - Oil on Canvas, 48 × 38 in, 121.9 × 96.5 cm
Georgia, South Carolina II, 2018 - Oil on Canvas, 25 × 24 in, 63.5 × 61 cm
Thoughts on The Beauty of Solitude by Nathan Mullins:
The paintings in The Beauty of Solitude were made from 2020 – 2021. These works mark a concentrated shift in my style and approach to both composition and paint handling. The imagery in the show is pulled from personal photographs taken during the global COVID-19 pandemic and from baseball cards and videos of great ball players from the my childhood and earlier.
Still images from baseball highlight reels are digitally manipulated to find the compositions from which the paintings are made. The found frozen moments are often transitional, creating layered pictures that bleed into one another in either obvious or obfuscated ways. These baseball paintings often end up being, through the lens of the television camera, images of isolation, creating both icons of deified athletes and meditations on the loneliness of social distancing.
I have also begun using personal photography as a base for finding compositions my everyday life. In a time when the outdoors and home have become refuges both welcome and overworn, these paintings seek to find peace and acceptance with life as it currently is.
In all these paintings, my focus, as I was making them, is on the way tone and color work together to create plastic pictorial spaces in which emotions can live. The interplay between simultaneous deep recession and the absolute flatness of paint on a surface creates a tension that invites contemplation and reflection.
Marmaduke: World Series '91, 2021 - Oil on Panel, 5 × 7 in, 12.7 × 17.8 cm
He Could Go All The Way, 2021 - Oil on Panel, 36 × 42 in, 91.4 × 106.7 cm
The Ryan Express, 2021 - Oil on Panel, 4 × 5 in, 10.2 × 12.7 cm
The Beauty of Solitude will be on display through March 2, 2022 at Adah Rose Gallery.
See more of the works from the exhibition on Artsy.
Check out our coverage of other current and recent art exhibitions
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES:
Emily Pettigrew is a representational painter, whose work is distinguished by a sparseness, subtlety, and timelessness, and emanates a quiet reverence for both history and nature. The aesthetics of Pettigrew's acrylic paintings, which often depict single figures and landscapes, were defined by formative years in Maine, refined by study in the New York art scene, and are increasingly woven with the spirit of the Catskill mountains. Pettigrew explains: “My love for the starkness of the landscape of my childhood is reflected in a spartanism in my work. My foundational principle of painting, is the removal of excess parts — a paring down to an image’s most beautiful elements.” Pettigrew currently lives and works from her 1822 home in Delhi, NY.
Nathan Mullins, born in Clarksdale, MS, received his BFA from The University of Southern Mississippi in 2012 and his MFA from American University in 2015. His solo exhibitions include The Beauty of Solitude at Adah Rose Gallery in 2022, Source Material at Thomas University in Thomasville, GA in 2018 and Supernatural, Superserious at Almost Circle Gallery in Biloxi, MS in 2017. His group exhibitions include Powers at Play: Sirena LaBurn & Nathan Mullins at The Art Studio, Inc. in Beaumont, TX in 2021; Amor Fati at Wagner College in Staten Island, NY in 2019; Hide and Seek in San Diego, CA in 2018; and Berlin and Back at the Goethe-Institut in Washington, DC in 2016. In 2021, he curated a show of drawings by women, Mythopoeia, at 621 Gallery in Tallahasse, FL, which included participation from poets in the doctoral program at Florida State University to produce a catalog, the sales of which directly supported Planned Parenthood of South, East and North Florida. Mullins wrote for the online and print publications produced by Mississippi Modern and served on the company's Board of Directors as Community Outreach Coordinator from 2014 – 2016. He taught painting, drawing, and design at Savannah State University in Savannah, GA from 2015 – 2018, art appreciation at Southern Regional Technical College since 2018, and design at the University of Southern Mississippi in 2020. He currently teaches painting and drawing at the University of Southern Mississippi and lives in Petal, MS with his partner and two cats.
