Cover- Dan's Papers,
September 7, 2007
October 17, 2003
The Southampton Press, May 30, 2002
"Art That Translates All the Senses onto Canvas” - Diana Bletter
Remsenburg artist Margery Gosnell says that her artwork is “a way to translate all my sense onto the canvas.”
Ms. Gosnell’s oil and watercolor paintings-which reveal the “smell of the air, the texture of the water, and the way the light changes” at the tip of the North Fork in Orient-will be on display in the Whitney Art Works Gallery in Greenport from June 1 through June 30.
Ms. Gosnell, a design and art history professor at the Suffolk. Community College Brentwood campus, said in a recent interview that she draws from her memory-and her personal vision. Suggesting that “everyone’s reality looks a little bit different,” she said she relies on her own sense of what she feels, and not what she’s “supposed to see.”
When she was little, Ms. Gosnell said, she was “one of those kids who could draw whatever they saw.” But Mary Buckley, a Pratt Institute professor with whom Ms. Gosnell studied en route to earning her MFA, “pushed” here to see ”realism using my own subjective voice.”
To illustrate what she meant, Ms. Gosnelll cut two snippets of green paper. She lay one on a blue piece of paper and one on a yellow piece of paper. The two greens were given a different cast because of their different backgrounds.“The knowledge that color is relative gave me the freedom to paint things the way I personally saw and felt them,” Ms. Gosnell said. She also said that, every moment, light changes.“Light transforms everything, but it’s never the same from one minute to the next.”
The artist said that she spent many hours in Orient, the subject of her
Greenport show. She never uses a camera, preferring to draw in a sketchbook to “record” her memory of what she “sees, hears, and feels” all around her.
She said that she sometimes sketches the scene several times, then she captures the subject using different media-printing, watercolor, and oil. She said she keeps doing the scene until she “gets it right.” Ms. Gosnell said that once “I get it, I don’t paint it again.”
Ms. Gosnell’s canvases are large, airy, colorful, and full of texture. One scene of Orient evolved from the time she was “moved by an image of four trees near the water,” But when she captured the image on canvas. The trees rearranged in her own imagination. Ms. Gosnell calls this the “magic of art.”
She said that she gets her inspiration from the French artist Pierre Bonnard, for his “use of color and structuring.” And Paul Klee for his “use of Planar motion.” In one of her paintings, “Sail Boats,” Ms. Gosnell captures the volume and texture of the water-as well as its movement-using bold brush strokes in greens. whites, and grays.
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Southampton Press, September 23, 2010
