Dowling Walsh Gallery to present new work by Sarah McRae Morton and abstract works by Will Barnet

Dowling Walsh Gallery is pleased to present “Sarah McRae Morton: Time After Time,” an exhibition of new paintings by the Rockland-based artist.

Widely admired and respected for her brilliantly crafted paintings that blend history, fact and fantasy, McRae Morton grew up in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where she began painting at an early age. During and after high school, she trained with the noted educator Myron Barnstone (1933-2016), who taught her the virtues of classical design, technical drafting and harmonic color theory. She furthered her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, earning a summer residency at the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The dream of living in Europe brought her to Cologne, Germany, where she lived for 10 years, studying for a time in Rome, and with the celebrated figurative painter Odd Nerdrum, in Norway.

The exhibition, “Sarah McRae Morton: Time After Time,” brings together a selection of the artist’s latest paintings, exploring the intertwined nature of time and place. As curator Suzette McAvoy writes in the exhibition catalog, “In her paintings, McRae Morton leads us through history, mythology, folklore and fables. Down rabbit holes of arcane facts and labyrinths of knowledge, spurred on by her restless brush and a desire to understand the ways of the world, human and otherwise.”

Sarah McRae Morton’s work has been exhibited across the U.S. and abroad and is in the permanent collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum. This is her fourth exhibition with Dowling Walsh Gallery.

The gallery will also present the solo exhibition “Will Barnet: Correspondence,” featuring the renowned artist’s lesser-known abstract works.

Widely known and internationally respected as a figurative painter and printmaker, Will Barnet (1911-2012), worked abstractly in the early and late decades of his career. The exhibition, Will Barnet: Correspondence, brings together a selection of the artist’s intimate, abstract works on paper from the 1950s, many of which were created on envelopes and postcards, with richly colored and imagined abstract paintings made in the years leading up to his death at the age of 101 in 2012. As Christopher B. Crosman writes in the exhibition catalog, “Barnet liked clarity, concision, and balance — correspondences, if you will, that could carry both representation and abstraction.”

A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet had one of the longest and most distinguished careers in American art. His work is in the collections of over 200 museums worldwide and has been the subject of more than eighty solo exhibitions. A highly respected teacher, Barnet taught for more than forty years at the Art Students League in New York City, as well as at other institutions, including Cooper Union, Cornell University, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

He first visited Maine in the late 1950s and returned nearly every summer after. First to Chamberlain on the Pemaquid Peninsula and later to Rock Gardens Inn, a group of charming historic cottages in Sebasco Estates, then owned by his daughter Ona. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he didn’t hesitate in his reply: “To create timeless art has always been my great ambition, to add another chapter to what came before, another notch in the history of painting.”

In the final decade of his life, Barnet revisited ideas he was exploring in his abstract work from the 1950s. “Now I’m working with abstract ideas again, but differently,” he said in an interview in 2009, “much more playful and open. Instead of the forms edging in on one another in a monumental way, the forms are opening up — they’re much more musical.”

Reviewing an exhibition of the artist’s late abstract paintings in 2010, NYTimes art critic Roberta Smith wrote, “This just in: At the imposing age of 99, the accomplished American painter Will Barnet has returned to abstraction, with excellent results … the paintings themselves are remarkably fresh in every way: the loosely locked-in compositions, stroke-by-stroke layering of colors and balance of restraint and flair. Mr. Barnet offers inspiring proof that it is never too late to sprout new leaves on painting, a tree that accommodates perpetual growth and renewal.”

Both exhibitions will be on view in the gallery’s newly renovated building at 357 Main St. in Rockland from July 5 to July 26, with a public reception from 4 to 6 p.m. July 11. For more information, go to www.dowlingwalsh.com.