Dowling Walsh Gallery features new work by Jamie Wyeth, Sarah McRae Morton, Tessa Greene O’Brien in July exhibitions

Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland will feature three solo exhibitions by artists Jamie Wyeth, Sarah McRae Morton and Tessa Greene O’Brien in July. A public reception celebrating the three shows will be held from 3 to 7 p.m. July 7.

Opening on July 1 and continuing through Aug. 1, “Jamie Wyeth: Preview | Unsettled” features a selection of new paintings by the acclaimed artist. Vividly colored, with energetic brushwork, Wyeth’s paintings range from intensely perceptive portraits of people, places, and animals he knows well to imaginary scenes touched with macabre humor. The show previews the upcoming major museum exhibition, Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled, to be presented at the Brandywine River Museum in 2024. The show at Dowling Walsh includes significant works from the artist’s recent Screen Door Sequence, incorporating found doors with large-scale oil paintings. Also included are new additions to the series Wyeth began in 2012, titled “Suite of Untoward Occurrences on Monhegan Island,” portraying tales of strange events on the isolated island that has been his part-time home since the 1960s. Other works, such as the expressively painted “Shell Middens,” 2022, depict his continuing close observation of the natural world. 

The son of artist Andrew Wyeth, James Browning Wyeth was raised in Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania. At age 12, he began formal training in drawing, composition and oil painting with his aunt Carolyn Wyeth. Working with his aunt, Jamie developed a love for the sensory nature of oil paint — its look, smell and feel — that has carried through his art. Since his first show in New York in 1965 at age nineteen, he has exhibited his work continuously throughout the United States and abroad, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2014. His works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Brandywine River Museum, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Terra Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He is a National Academy of Design member and has served on the National Endowment for the Arts Council. 

Opening on July 7 and continuing through July 29 are two solo exhibitions: “Sarah McRae Morton: New Paintings” and “Tessa Greene O’Brien: I’m Back at my Cliff, Still Throwing Things Off.”

Sarah McRae Morton is noted for her lushly painted images that bridge contemporary and historical concerns.

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, she began painting at a young age and started formal training in color theory, classical design, and oil painting during high school.

Further studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and courses at the University of Pennsylvania led to a travel fellowship in Europe, where she trained with the celebrated figurative painter Odd Nerdrum in Norway and at the Vatican Museums Laboratory in Rome.

McRae Morton’s deep knowledge of art, history, and literature informs her brilliantly composed paintings that often appear as dreams or visions from the past, as in Black Cat, Blush Herring and Swan Upping, Loon Landing, two works completed this year. 

McRae Morton attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Monson Arts, and the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S. and in Germany.

She lives in Rockland.

“Tessa Greene O’Brien: I’m Back at my Cliff, Still Throwing Things Off” presents new works by the artist that push her explorations of paint into evermore vibrant and varied effects. The canvases pulse with color and light. In several recent works, she begins by dying the canvas before adding paint, allowing the color of the ground to illuminate and define negative shapes and markings within the compositions. While O’Brien frequently employs pouring, staining, and scraping techniques to achieve her visual aims, her paintings all begin from direct observation. Her subjects are people, places, and things that are meaningful to her.

In her own words, she says, “Painting is vast. I want to know everything about it and I love that I never will. In a game that has almost no fixed rules, the limitations only appear when I bump up against myself, and that is the cliff that I return to. Painting is a dare, painting as a game. The game at play in this current group of paintings involves two types of surfaces, oil grounds and dyed canvas. As I worked on the two surfaces simultaneously, distinct qualities emerged; With oil grounds, the bright white surface amplifies color and records every brushstroke. The paintings feel light and breezy, full of air and swirling marks. The dyed canvas paintings are more grounded: the color recedes instead of jumping forward, sinking into the absorbent surface, and they feel slightly more mysterious and dramatic. The challenge arose of how to connect these two techniques, to make the paintings buzz together like the right combination of guests at a dinner party, equal parts harmony and tension. To make it all sing, I began to interrupt them– bringing more airiness to the dyed pieces, and more gravitas to the grounds. It became a game to weave the paintings into a cohesive world of vernacular glimpses, weather, interiors, and intimate moments, heavy and light, linked together through visual clues and keys.  I paint what I see and what I know. Depicting the things, places, and people that I am intimately familiar with allows me great freedom, in the same way that people relax and become their most expansive selves amongst their inner circles. Observation grounds me in my surroundings, encouraging slow looking and delight in the mundane; this practice is the closest that I come to prayer. Joy and playfulness enter the paintings as I balance the faithful recording of details with an experimental approach to transcribing the atmosphere and emotionality of a moment.”

A Maine native, O’Brien received a bachelor of science degree in fine art from Skidmore College and an MFA from Maine College of Art and Design. She was a 2022-2023 Residential Fellow at The Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College in Waterville, where she recently completed the public art mural “Fields Alive with Pollen and Bees” at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center. Previous residencies include Surf Point Foundation, Tides Institute, Monson Arts, Haystack, Hewnoaks, Vermont Studio Center, Joseph A. Fiore Art Center, and the Stephen Pace House. She has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the U.S.. She lives in South Portland. 

Dowling Walsh Gallery, established in 2007, is located at 365 Main St. in Rockland. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment on Sundays and Mondays. Visit www.dowlingwalsh.com, or call 207-596-0084 for more information.