Past Exhibition
The Nude, Mirror of Desire
October 16 – November 19, 2016
Paintings by Paul DuSold, Scott Noel, Ben Kamihira and Margaret McCann as well as Lennart Anderson, Mark Green and Frank Galuszka.
The Nude, Mirror of Desire
The threads of Quaker, Catholic, and Jewish ethical culture woven into Philadelphia’s history have had a challenging but unexpectedly nourishing relationship with the city’s art from the dawn of the republic. Spiritual traditions are justly suspicious of the drives that fuel poetry and painting. Ambition, the intoxication of physical inspiration, the love of language for its own sake, and the absorption in private obsession define the arts, but the work they fuel has had one of its best and most consistent homes in the city of brotherly love. Partly this is due to education: a feeling for art is one of the refinements of citizenship. Still, there is a strangeness to Philadelphia’s harboring of such poets of the body as Walt Whitman, Thomas Eakins, and Arthur B. Carles.
The Nude, Mirror of Desire, picks up the theme of Philadelphia’s centrality to negotiating the charged subject of the figure. Ben Kamihira, Paul DuSold, Margaret McCann, and Scott Noel paint the figure from personal obsession, but with an equal feeling for the traditions of eloquence the subject has inspired throughout the history of painting. Along with the hope of providing visual pleasure, the painters ask very quietly, what becomes of desire when it encounters the demands of form?
This exhibition of painters Ben Kamihira, Scott Noel, Margaret McCann and Paul DuSold focuses on the human figure in the form of the nude.
Watch an interview with Scott Noel and Paul DuSold
Artist reception: October 16, 3:00 – 5:00 pm
Painting lecture with jurors: October 29, 3:00
Workshop with Paul DuSold: October 29 & 30, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
Workshop with Scott Noel: November 5 & 6, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
Scott Noel
Ben Kamihira
Margaret McCann
Top of page: Paul DuSold