COMPOSITIONS: Bruce Abbey Exhibition + Gallery Talk

With a grounding in a formalist tradition with a bias towards seeing architecture as the interconnection of drawing and painting this work represents my modest efforts at being a “perpetual student” over the past 50 years. The juxtaposition of spatial techniques, or ideas in a given project, is used as a means of exploring values that can be both absorbed and taught. A dialectical method that argues more for synthesis than confrontation as a final result. A focus of this exhibit is the relationship of drawing to the final project as an integral part of the design process. The exhibited projects and paintings respond to a set of ideas or issues to be resolved, be they programmatic, formal, social and/or pictorial. What unites the work is a desire to use traditional techniques of spatial representation and formal manipulation to inform and illustrate a solution.Through cross-referencing, the work that links one project to another; sometimes from pictorial to architectural and other times from project to project.  The themes explored are: painterly and universal, the making of place that recognizes historical context and modernity, illusion and real depth, wall versus frame, line and contour versus color and explorations between painting and architecture. Each image pre-supposes a problem to solve, a device or devices to help resolve and express the solution as an application of appropriate technique.