Lucy MacGillis, a Berkshire-born Painter's Umbrian Landscapes and Still Lifes
Impressive work from a young expatriate artist
By: Michael Miller - Aug 15, 2007
Lucy MacGillis, Paintings
at the Hoadley Gallery,
21 Church Street, Lenox, Massachusetts
01240
413.637.2814 · 413.443.4713 fax
now closed
http://www.hoadleygallery.com
Lucy MacGillis grew up not far from Melville's famous prospect of Mt. Greylock, surrounded by the rolling expanses, hills, and wooded slopes of the Berkshires. Since 2000 she has lived and worked in a small Umbrian town, Monte Castello di Vibio, not far from Todi, painting landscapes and familiar objects around her studio and the simple house where she lives. The distant views and the rooms of the house alike are filled with the clear, warm light of Umbria. As she explained to me, showing me photographs as illustrations, her point of departure is this all-encompassing light and its subtle changes through the course of the day and the seasons. Wherever she goes from there, she is guided by her eye. This visual experience, she says, slows down her painting, reflecting the slow, tranquil life in the town.
Although her paintings, all oils on canvas or linen, are devoid of human figures on a literal level, they are full of human life. The apricots and figs in her still life paintings will be eaten, the bottles consumed, the distant caffetiera on the stove emptied into the cup discreetly looming in the foreground. In this direct experience of light, color, texture, and space and in the connoted life around and within them, Lucy MacGillis invites us to share obliquely in her life. For the viewer, as he or she contemplates each canvas, this grows into a feeling of actually being present on the spot.
Apart from the carefully developed technique of her work and its seductive light and color, it is surely this immediacy, this vivid recreation of the experience of life in an Umbrian hill town which accounts for the popularity of this young painter's work. In her exhibitions at the Hoadley Gallery in Lenox, Lucy MacGillis's work has sold readily to local and visiting collectors, who may or may not find evocations of some favorite Italian locality in them. Working in oil of varying impasto on markedly textured canvas and linen, she develops not only this deceptively simple experiential illusion, but also a Cézanne-like structure, however gently implied, as well as a richly developed but informal play of brushwork. As natural and unpretentious as this informality may seem the work is consistently complete. Her aims go far beyond pure impression.
Several canvases are filled with partial views of spaces in the artist's home. These are often exactly or approximately square in format, making us keenly aware of her careful selection of her point and extent of vision. As simple and unpretentious as they appear, these prove in fact to be complex and subtle in design. In La Camera (19 x 20 in.) the recession of the three planes of two walls and the floor lead our eye into a corner occupied by a guardroba faced with a narrow vertical mirror, which reflects the directly unseen, brightly lit corner opposite. Through the bare window next it we see the valley and the mountains beyond, and light pours in aslant, stimlating warm resonances within. This sense of light in spaces, the circumscribed domestic interior and the vastness without (confined to the split vertical openings of the window, which echo the mirror), is contrasted with the crumpled white bedspread, a flattened surface negating perspective, which occupies some forty percent of the canvas. In it we see nothing but the action of light over its irregular surface.
In other, closer observations of domestic details, of apricots in a bowl or an almost empty cup of caffè latte on a table, slightly disturbing a striped yellow tablecloth, she becomes more intently concerned with flattened, but irregular surfaces, their varying textures, and the light playing over them. In Luglio, large square work (30 x 30 in.) we see a varied array of plates and bowls containing green figs, a machinetta, and a ewer over the striped tablecloth, which the light has now transformed into a Vuillardesque green. In the even larger landscape (52 x 52 in.), La Tenuta, the artist shows a cooler aspect of the Umbrian light, as it coruscates through the blue sky, patched with clouds, over fields, both verdant and tawny, to cut out planes among foreground buildings and vegetation with sculptural energy.
Although Cézanne, Morandi, and her former teachers John Lees and William Bailey are most definitely present, Ms. MacGillis is well along in her own course. She looks much more at her environment than at any models she may have encountered. She studied art and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2000. In the course of this university grants brought her to Umbria, where she now lives with her husband and child. The ensuing years were filled with marriage, work, and a string of exhibitions in Philadelphia, Monte Castello di Vibio, Perugia, Rome, and of course Lenox, where the Hoadley Gallery has been presenting one-woman shows of her work since 2003. Ms. MacGillis's 2007 show was a success as always, some works can still be seen at the gallery, and we can look forward to seeing the fruits of her coming year next summer.
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e-mail: mjmiller@thedrawingsite.com