Callen McJunkin Gallery

BARRY VANCE: SELECTIONS from DWELLING in the BACKCOUNTRY      Callen McJunkin Gallery presents paintings by Barry Vance: Selections from Dwelling in the Backcountry January 29th through February 28th, 2009, with a reception for the artist on Thursday evening, February 5th from 5:30 - 7:30 pm. The exhibition features 16 tiny, minutely detailed paintings, 7" by 9" inches, oil on panel, depicting scenes of rural West Virginia life predominantly drawn from Randolph, Hardy, Jefferson and Pendleton Counties. The paintings are accompanied by passages selected by the artist from literature, poetry, music, and historical journals that present a vivid sense of place. According to the artist, "The paintings and the passages are intended, each in their own way, to provide an insight into life in the backcountry."
     Historically, the region referred to as the backcountry encompassed the area of the colony of Virginia west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the 18th century it was a remote frontier stretching from Harpers Ferry at the north to the Cumberland Gap at the south and extending westward into the Allegheny Mountains and beyond.
     Vance begins his paintings from drawings and sketches accumulated from over thirty years of living and working in the backcountry relying entirely on memory, his sketchbook, and his knowledge of the region. A disciplined painter and student of art history, Vance's paintings are a fusion of multiple influences: from the atmospheric vertical rises in early Chinese painting to the geometry of contemporary American painter Elizabeth Murray, from early Renaissance imagery in Les Tres Riches Heures (The Book of Hours to 20th c. American painters Grant Wood and Edward Hopper, these paintings are rich beyond what their diminutive physical presence dictates.
     The following passage is from one of the many references included in this multidisciplinary exhibition:

Over the Blue Ridge, the whisperer starts to whisper in tongues
Remembered landscapes are left in me
The way a bee leaves its sting,
Hopelessly, passion placed,
Untranslatable language.
Non-mystical, insoluble in blood, they act as an opposite
To the absolute, whose words are a solitude, and set to music.
All forms of landscape are autobiographical.
        - "All Landscape is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself," Appalachia, Charles Wright, 1998

     The exhibition "Dwelling in the Backcountry" initially premiered three years ago at the West Virginia Division of Cultural and History, and has been traveling to a variety of cultural institutions, and now returns to Charleston for a farewell exhibit as the paintings are sold and dispersed.