News

American abstract painter Walter Darby Bannard died on Sunday, October 2, 2016 in Miami, announced Berry Campbell gallery. He was 82 years old. A pioneer of color field painting in the 1950s, Walter Darby Bannard (1934-2016) was committed to color-based and expressionist abstraction for over six decades.

Walter Darby Bannard, an American abstract painter and a pioneer of Color Field painting in the 1950s, died on Sunday, October 2, in Miami at the age of eighty-two.

The presence of Walter Darby Bannard in my life was an accident. I went to graduate school at the University of Miami largely because my father was the dean of the College of Engineering and it made financial sense for my family. Darby was increasingly having trouble selling paintings in New York by the early '90s, he admitted to me, but he could have ended up at a lot of schools that would be happy to have someone of his caliber on the faculty. South Florida, he said, had the advantage of being warm.

Although the scratchy lines convey a certain sense of itchiness or irritation, they are set in a context of quiet reflection. Thus as a whole these paintings are harmonious, not grating, organized and not chaotic. 

Above all, they are triumphantly human – though occasionally, a wild little sun puts in an appearance, as in the small gem that greets the visitor upon entering the gallery, and is entitled, “Winter Country Fields and Sky” (2015).

Eric Dever’s work is black and white and red all over. He began using the limited color palette 10 years ago this month as a way to create subjective designs that echo hues from the environment. Before summer ends, people can experience his work at exhibits in New York City and the Hamptons. I caught up with Dever at his studio in Water Mill to find out more about his upcoming projects, what inspires his creativity and the meaning behind his abstractions.

Christine Berry and Martha Campbell launched their gallery to bring attention to the works of a selection of postwar and contemporary artists and revealing how these artists have advanced ideas and lessons in powerful and new directions. Berry Campbell provided five paintings by Jill Nathanson for MOCA Jacksonville's Confronting the Canvas: Women of Abstraction. Berry traveled to Jacksonville to see the exhibition, and we asked her a few questions.

Mike Solomon creates beautiful, color saturated paintings that have a built-in grid reminiscent of early Larry Poons geometric accents, which contain an elegant veil of dreamlike mist. Solomon is a tastemaker if there ever was one, and coupled with his unusual acquaintances, including his experiences as a studio assistant to John Chamberlain, James Brooks and Charlotte Park, and collectors like Edward Albee, Beth DeWoody, Dan Flavin and Richard Meier, among others, this kind of professional support and relationships are simply golden, and it shows.

It was New Year’s Day of 1946 when Annie Solomon and her husband Syd, who had finished his service as a camoufleur — a specialist in the design and implementation of camouflage — in the war, arrived in Sarasota, where they intended to start their new life together. They’d met five years earlier, just after Pearl Harbor, at a distant cousin’s wedding when Annie, a graduate of Ohio State, was 21.

A fair number of people by this time must know that I greatly admire the mostly-mixed- media abstract paintings of Stanley Boxer.  Since I started posting at this website, I’ve discussed his work four times, most recently and at greatest length when he showed at Spanierman Modern in 2012. Before then – around 2009, I believe – I dealt at even greater length in reviewing his retrospective that premiered in Richmond, Virginia and went on to tour in New England and Florida.

I am happy to report that his recent show at Berry Campbell (closed May 21) carried on his unique gifts with many more pleasures. 

Painter Stanley Boxer used the term “manufacture” to describe his process. His late-period paintings currently on view at Berry Campbell Gallery demonstrate this notion of assemblage remarkably well. His abstractions integrate raw materials into a polished whole, all the while retaining evidence of painting as pure, manual labor.

Boxer’s body of work gives renewed meaning to what used to be called “all-over painting.” Employing multiple brushwork techniques within any single painting, Boxer crams his surfaces with impastos, drips, dabs, washes, and three dimensional objects, foregrounding both the serene and frictional properties of painting. Embedded materials such as sawdust, stones, glitter, twine, and netting produce mysterious depths within the thick, textured, melted and bleeding color.