Bombers, Books, & Bugs

New and Old Work from Robert Spellman

Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado USA. January 26th - March 2nd, 2018

Nalanda Gallery; 63rd & Arapahoe Ave.

The work in this exhibition represents a variety of painting endeavors from the past three decades. The most recent work is the World War II fighter plane triptychs, which I have been doing since 2013. Two of these were finished just weeks ago. Also recent are the Dragonfly books. These are part of an ongoing interest in very old books. There could be many things to say about ancient books and the accumulated signs of human handling and the passage of time; these pieces mimic something of that quality. You’ll also see two triptych paintings of sofas here. Old sofas, like old books, are a passive receptacle of their owners’ lives, and they too give off a strange poetry of evanescence. (I submitted these for inclusion in last year’s MassArt Bienniel Exhibition on Habitat. My contention that a sofa is a type of habitat failed to convince the curators.) The Ladybug paintings are also an ongoing series; the examples here were shown at the Denver Botanic Gardens in 2013 and at the Garrison Institute in 2014. The nine-panel Lily and Iris paintings, also part of the Botanic Gardens exhibition, go back into the early years of this century. The large Boulder Creek and Long Pond paintings were on display at the Dairy Center for the Arts around 2002. The unmounted drawings of hands are all part of a single project, which I do every year alongside my advanced drawing students, of taking an object or theme and producing one hundred pieces. They were in a 1996 exhibition at the Axis Mundi gallery, which is no longer in business. The Pewter Salt & Pepper painting was featured in last year’s History of the Visual Arts in Boulder exhibition at the Boulder Library. Finally, the Captain America triptych reveals a lifelong zeal for the imagery of comic books. The title of this painting has the words, “…Mont Sainte Victoire, as seen from Les Lauves”; this is a sly reference to Paul Çezanne one of my favorite painters; the sharp-eyed observer will discover the barest outline of that revered mountain in the painting.

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