Roy Germon

Roy Germon and Dan West: Views From Nature
August 20-September 16, 2018
Artists' Reception Saturday, August 25, 4-6 pm

In my paintings, I am more likely to rely on the strength of a broad brushstroke over a finely drawn detail of the landscape. Invented color relationships often win out over a more exact palate found in nature. Though many of the locations in my paintings have real and emotional significance to me, ultimately my paintings are ideas of those places, transformed by my systems of organization and mark making. My manipulation of “place” is both intentional and intuitive and the most successful works comprise equal parts observation, imagination and discovery.

Roy Germon

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Roy Germon's paintings are extremely refined in both their conceptual and painterly qualities. They present themselves immediately as self-consciously exquisite objects. First glance can be deceiving, however, since the paintings themselves mix and shift between broader and more subtle gestures.

The smaller works use their most intimate scale almost like a sanctuary from which they reveal themselves in their own-patient-time.

The images often exude an immediate legibility, but are far more likely to be insistently subtle and welcome the viewer to a slower, richer experience. In this manner, they inevitably surprise the viewer with a visual narrative that compels savoring. To his credit, this is not a default mode for (Roy) Germon: he is a trained and adept illustrator. He is a master of clarity, legibility and immediacy of message.

His paintings, though, often wrap themselves around a set of gestures-deft but not slick-and cycle between the image and Germon's refined mark-making. A seascape by Roy Germon may seem to be a very simple tiny thing in a beautiful frame, but as the viewer scans the image, the apparent forms dissolve into brushwork or pencil marks-traces of the artist's process.

Mr. Germon excels at taking the view full circle: the encounter with a painting on the wall moves from the presentation of the image and back to the completely self-aware painting as object.

His works are extremely satisfying, surprisingly rich and almost politely respectful to the viewer in that they are so handsomely framed and presented.

Daniel Kany