Show Preview | Texas Masters

Fredericksburg, TX
InSight Gallery, March 6-27

Cheri Christensen, Late Evening Light, oil, 40 x 60.

This story was featured in the March 2015 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March 2015 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story!

March marks wildflower season in Texas, when nearly every patch of earth is covered with bluebonnets. It’s fitting, then, that InSight Gallery passes this color-filled month with its annual Texas Masters show; the gallery opens this, its sixth such show, with a feast of wild game and margaritas on March 6 from 6 to 8 p.m. Many of the 20 gallery artists exhibiting in Texas Masters attend the artists’ reception. Collectors can expect more than 40 new works from the likes of Roy Andersen, Jill Carver, Teresa Elliott, Bruce Greene, and Francois Koch, to name a few.

“InSight Gallery has a lot of fantastic artists from all over the U.S. and overseas,” says Elizabeth Harris, gallery associate. “We like to do one show a year that highlights the talent coming out of Texas. A lot of the time, people think Texas artists are only doing western paintings. But the breadth of style and subjects is as diverse as the state itself.”

The subjects may not even be Texas itself. Jill Carver, who originally hails from London, England, divides her time between Austin, TX, and Rico, CO. A trip camping and painting in Colorado last year inspired MAGICAL WATERS. “I adore painting water, and the colors in this scene were hard to pass up—particularly those blue-grays found in the cast shadows radiating out from the shore bank, as well as the chorus of greens,” she observes. “I might usually claim the dark masses of the spruce to create an underlying core shadow structure in order to set up the whole scene, but in this piece, I wanted to claim all their glorious hues, too, and see if I could get that luminosity of color throughout the whole piece. So, it was not so much about the vista as such; it was about the riot of color that impacts you as the viewer.” At press time, Carver was also at work on a subtle Texas Hill Country creek scene whose soft saturation of a gray day will contrast with the colorful MAGICAL WATERS. “Jill is doing some really tremendous work right now,” says Harris. “There’s a freshness and looseness to her brushwork and color palette that’s really appealing.”

Francois Koch, Bygone Days, oil, 12 x 18.

Francois Koch, another Texas transplant, is also drawing upon a subject from outside the state for his first painting to be featured in Texas Masters. The South African painter is a new Lone Star State resident; he and his wife moved there in 2014 because it reminded them of the African landscape. “His landscapes are far reaching and quite universal,” says Harris. “The colors are clear and vivid, yet there’s a softness to his palette and his skies. It’s tight where it needs to be tight and loose where it needs to be loose.” In BYGONE DAYS, Koch portrays a nonspecific place that travels in Idaho and Colorado inspired. The image features a derelict farm cottage—a subject he paints frequently—along with an elderly woman walking with a stick. The color scheme is, however, somewhat of a departure: “I tend to paint more fall and winter scenery, but in this painting there’s quite a bit of green,” Koch says. It seems a timely palette for Texas in the springtime. —Ashley M. Biggers

contact information
830.997.9920
www.insightgallery.com

Featured in the March 2015 issue of Southwest Art magazine–click below to purchase:
Southwest Art March 2015 print issue or digital download Or subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss a story!