Thomas Sgouros
Untitled
Untitled
oil on canvas
1992
1992
September 13 through October 2, 2009
Great Expectations - A Tale of Two Artists: A retrospective exhibition featuring the work of Maxwell Mays and Thomas Sgouros
Thomas Sgouros is an internationally renowned artist with an impressive career in illustration. He is particularly known for his accomplished watercolor work. An influential professor in the illustration department at the Rhode Island School of Design for decades, he was appointed Helen M. Danforth Distinguished Professor in 1991 in honor of his teaching efforts. He was elected to the National Academy in 1992 and in 1991 received a CFS Medal from the American Watercolor Society, of which he has been a signature member since 1954. In 2001, Sgouros received the Claibourne Pell Award for lifetime achievement. His work is in numerous corporate and private collections, including museums in Rhode Island, Maine, Alaska, Florida and Ohio.
Sgouros' September exhibition at the Providence Art Club will include recent paintings from his current body of work, the Remembered Landscapes, in conjunction with rarely exhibited earlier work. Sgouros first became known for a finely tuned, observant eye that recorded still life and landscape with equal sensitivity. He has long been fascinated with repetitive series and, when talking about Sgouros' work, critics often cite an obsessive return to the same subject matter akin to the work of Georgio Morandi. His Thomas' Trumpets series features bicycle horns hung against the cement walls of his garage while the Steeple Street Still Lives nestled oil and vinegar cruets, sugar bowls and favored fine art postcards on mirrors. In both series, Sgouros elevates the quotidian objects in his still lives, compelling the viewer with his honest and masterful rendering.Great Expectations - A Tale of Two Artists: A retrospective exhibition featuring the work of Maxwell Mays and Thomas Sgouros
His current body of work, the Remembered Landscapes, executed in oil, watercolor and pastel, are evocations of place, non-specific meditations on the essence of landscape – stark horizon and roiling sky. Living for the last decade with progressively worsening macular degeneration, Sgouros now paints landscapes culled from memory. Working with severely compromised vision, he is still able to render tone and value like a master. He works from a palette laid out in the same color order he has used for 50 years, the colors memorized, though at times difficult to distinguish.
The Remembered Landscapes are a testament to Sgouros’ passion and commitment to visual expression, and his unflappable urge to make pictures. These paintings are pure formal abstractions laid onto the tripartite skeleton of landscape that Sgouros articulates as foreground, horizon line and sky. The images are lyrical and balanced, they invite musical metaphors, and they resonate with meaning because they are stripped down to their barest essence. Viewers often insist, “I’ve been there, I know that place,” certain that they recognize the locale pictured in a composition. With this body of work, Sgouros has touched on a universal chord, the human connection to place and the artist’s perennial urge to record it.