Big Spaces on the Small Scale: Contemporary Landscape Painting
Event Actions
An exhibition of New York regional professional and contemporary landscape painters.
This exhibition of small landscape paintings brings together artists who explore light, water, perception, and humanity’s evolving relationship to the natural world. Although these paintings are small in scale, each artist demonstrates the genre’s expansiveness and individual inventiveness. Moving fluidly between representation and abstraction, their works share a sensitivity to atmosphere and impermanence, inviting close looking and quiet reflection.
Water and light emerge as central forces. For Laura Barr, water is both subject and metaphor depicted through color, transparency, reflection, and strong geometric structure to capture fleeting moments when the ordinary becomes transcendent. Sarah Roche’s paintings reflect on the present and everlasting local to global watershed, the wider natural world, and the span of time. Painted from life in the artist’s hometown in New Jersey, these are part of a series of paintings that are related to the water cycle, local geology, riparian areas, and the environment in general. Mary Temple’s recent First Light paintings distill the luminosity of dawn reflected on water, each completed in a single sitting to mirror the ephemerality of the experience. Across these practices, water becomes a site of meditation, memory, and preservation.
Light, in its many forms, animates the natural and built environment. Kathryn Lynch saturates her landscapes with sun, moon, fog, and city glow, transforming trees, waterways, and tugboats into dreamlike presences. Allison Cuomo approaches painting as an act of attunement; her intuitive brushwork and sensitivity to color position nature as a collaborator, resulting in canvases that feel like ongoing conversations with the weather and seasons. Frank Webster depicts the Icelandic landscape from observation as something ethereal and quietly melancholic, contemplating the fragile coexistence of romanticism, technology, and the natural world.
Other artists probe perception more directly. John Cox translates the visual language of the digital age into layered, gestural surfaces inspired by glitches, static, and wave patterns, an analog meditation on speed and disruption. Nancy Diamond blurs observation and invention, creating hallucinatory yet grounded images that explore resilience, time, and the space between the familiar and the unknown. Victoria Rolett layers imagery drawn from photography and observation to examine preservation, decay, and climate change, pairing humor and hope with evidence of transformation. In his miniature narrative landscapes, Jason Phillips reflects on humanity’s place within and impact upon the environment.
Together, these intimate works offer distinct yet interwoven meditations on landscape, not only as place, but as experience. Through light, water, and shifting perception, each artist reveals a world at once fragile and luminous, grounded in observation yet open to transformation.
The exhibition is on view from March 9th to April 11th.
Exhibition Reception: March 25th, 4:00 pm -6:00 pm
Artists: Laura Barr, John Cox, Alison Cuomo, Nancy Diamond, Kathryn Lynch, Jason Phillips, Sarah Roche, Victoria Rolett, Mary Temple, Frank Webster, Laura Von Rosk
Curated by Professor Kellyann Monaghan
This event is sponsored by the Library, Collections and Gallery, Art and Art History Department, and the College of Arts and Sciences.