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Living in this particular part of the world has often provided artistic inspiration for Fine Arts Professor of the Practice Stoney Conley, whose works are the subject of a current O’Neill Library exhibit.
“I live under a northern sky,” he explains in his introduction. “The light, its color, intensity, sensation, season, and length of day influence my psyche, mood, interior life and art practice. The long hours of daylight during summer and short hours during winter define our seasons, influence our lives, and distance us from our southern neighbors.”
This influence has inspired him over the past few years to incorporate painting and collage to create works that “are combinations of painted skies conjoined with tree forms.”
Conley’s “Northern Sky“ exhibit comprises 13 pieces and traces their development from earliest to most recent, spanning 2010 to 2014. A career painter and accomplished artist whose work has been widely exhibited in Boston and New England, Conley has taught at BC since 1982 and was McMullen Museum of Art curator from 1988-2005. He has been the recipient of many awards and distinctions for his work, and his paintings are contained in both museum and corporate collections.
To create his collages, Conley cuts forms with a razor knife – a blunt tool compared to a brush. The technique, “forces one to simplify, to see the whole and not get lost in details,” he explains. “Making these collage-paintings allows me to paint, attempting to capture the sky, the quality of light and color, how it filters through the clouds and atmosphere.”
After combining a dark image of trees or a distant horizon, he makes an ink or acrylic image on thin paper; when dry, it is placed on a heavier sheet of watercolor paper painted black. “I [then] cut the image out, cutting through both sheets. After aligning and adjusting, the silhouette is glued on top of the sky painting.” Of the dimension added by collage, he said the sharp cut edges of paper make a visual break in the space, and separate foreground from background.
During summers spent in Maine, Conley observes the early morning and late afternoon views of horizons of trees against the sky. His inspiration also includes a summer drawing class he has taught in Venice. A side trip to Vicenza – the setting sun silhouetting a hill ridge, with a church and surrounding umbrella pines and Cyprus trees against the sky – sparked the first work on display. Several large trees in Massachusetts became the focus for his winter pieces.
According to Conley, his previous oil painting landscapes were completed in one or two sittings “in a flurry of painting while the paint is wet. Although I love that technique I wanted to slow down my process. Adding the collage stretches out the process; there is more time to contemplate compositional changes, more opportunity to refine the work.”
The pieces on display, he says, are “contemplative moments in nature. In our busy lives we forget to slow down and notice the world we inhabit. Noticing is the first step to making an image that captures an experience in physical materials.”
One piece from July 2013, “The Northern Sky: Pink and Tree,” came as a result of jet lag. Having just returned from Italy, and still on Italian time, Conley got up before dawn and found himself captivated by the light in the sky. The English novelist Henry James helped provide inspiration for another work, “Northern Sky: Summer Afternoon,” as Conley explains: “[James] said the two most beautiful words in the English language were a ‘summer afternoon.’ I recalled that scene and made the painting last winter - when I needed summer the most.”
Among those praising Conley’s exhibit are some who know him quite well: his students. Senior Nuria Boj calls his use of collage “very effective; the monochrome nature of the black paper draws my attention to the silhouette of the trees more so than if they were painted the same way as the background.” Boj adds that Conley’s works have inspired her to find new ways to create mixed media collages.
Another senior, Stephanie Viccaro, says “Northern Sky” offers a means to see “in practice, a lot of the theoretical techniques he shared with us. He taught us how you can use collage to add a sense of illusion to the art, and how you can collage with almost anything.”
For more on the “Northern Sky” exhibit, see http://bit.ly/1826tT4.