RAY CHARLES WHITE – WATER PAINTINGS
ROBERT HARMS – RECENT PAINTINGS
Dates: July 7 – August 21
Open by Appointment August 22 – September 6
Opening Reception: Wednesday, July 7, 6 – 8 pm

Marcel Sitcoske Gallery will present a two-person exhibition featuring the work of photographer Ray Charles White and painter Robert Harms. The exhibition opens Wednesday, July 7.

Ray Charles White captures his subjects at their most candid and expressive. He portrays them with an honesty that most photographers strive for yet never quite achieve. With his new series of water paintings, White has focused his unflinching eye on the natural world. Made in collaboration with printer
Jean-Paul Russell of Durham Press, these works are screenprinted from photographs using enamel paint on aluminum and ink on canvas. They present images of water with a sincerity and integrity characteristic of all of White’s work. In the incredibly prolific career of this young artist, his subjects have included such cultural and artistic figures as Tony Bennett, Dennis Hopper, David Hockney and Henry Geldzahler. Originally from Toronto, White moved to New York City at a young age to prove himself as an artist, studying with Ansel Adams in the early 1980’s. Since then he has been taking the portraits of the people who shape the way we perceive the world: artists, writers, actors, musicians and scholars. In his latest body of work, White applies the style that he has developed over the past twenty years to quite a different subject, with equally impressive results.

The works of Amagansett based painter Robert Harms have a beauty and a strength that one appreciates the more time one spends with them. In seeming opposition to current trends, Harms uses traditional media in order to give form to a complex yet subtle vision. His work shows ties not only to Abstract Expressionism, (he studied with the late Joan Mitchell), but also to Impressionism and 19th century landscape painting. His style is uniquely his own, however. As he notes, “I don’t think of myself as an Abstract Expressionist…I’m more like an abstract painter who loves their work. What I do is not trendy or avant-garde; it’s an intuitive thing I’ve always followed.” His new paintings take the natural world of Long Island as a point of departure for vividly colored and confidently painted abstractions with heavily worked surfaces. In the work of Robert Harms, we are made aware of how far painting has come and how great the possibilities of this medium are.