jane bloodgood-abrams

RECENT PAINTINGS
FEBRUARY 1 - MARCH 4, 2006

DFN Gallery is pleased to present Jane Bloodgood-Abrams' oil paintings on canvas, linen, and panel.  They feature the landscapes of the Hudson River Valley, first immortalized in the mid-to-late 19th century by the painters of the Hudson River School.  Like Cole and Inness before her, Bloodgood-Abrams' work incorporates a spirituality and sense of permanence that extend far beyond the fleeting moments she captures with her brush: those moments when light, mountain, sky, and waterway converge to create a distinct and transcendental emotional impression.

While drawing initially from the empirical, Jane Bloodgood-Abrams relies primarily on what she terms the "spiritual essence" of the landscape to create more intuitive compositions.  This process of internalization--or "tempering and distillation," as she puts it--is "less about documenting a particular place and more about expressing a particular emotional memory of the landscape."  The practical application of  this philosophy results in the saturated, glowing canvases the artist produces in her studio, such as Last Glowing and Dramatic Light over the Hudson.  She builds up glazed layers gradually to create the subtle glow and color effects of the Hudson River School painters, but then incorporates a looser, more tonal approach to the vistas and panoramas of the Valley.  The result is a reconstruction, or, perhaps more aptly, a recreation, of the drama of man's relationship with nature: a series of transitory moments reaching for the sublime.

Bloodgood-Abrams was raised in the Hudson Valley region.  She received a BSA from the College of Saint Rose, Albany, and an MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz.  Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, Austria, Germany, and Italy.  In addition to spending time in Cologne, Germany, as a participant of the Rhine-Hudson Artist Exchange, Jane Bloodgood-Abrams was also a recipient of the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant.  This is her first solo show with DFN.

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