NORTHPORT — Bayside Arts presents Time and Transformation, The Art of John Woolsey, on Friday, Aug. 9 at 7:30 p.m. in the Bayside Community Hall, 813 Shore Road, Northport. The event is free.
In this informal talk, illustrated with many examples of his work, Woolsey explores the concepts of time, breakdown, reordering and renewal in nature and discusses the sources and processes he uses to manifest them in his work.
Woolsey earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, studying with Alex Katz, Yvonne Jacquette, and Neil Welliver, among others.
He writes, “In graduate school, after exploring abstraction as an undergraduate, I rediscovered landscape, my subject since that time. Prompted partly by my day-job work where I developed art programs for several college geology texts, I became fascinated with the scale of time and the ways in which nature breaks down and then reassembles itself. Starting in the 1990s, I painted large granite erratic boulders deposited by the last glaciers about 15,000 years ago on forested land that was farmed 125 years ago; and marveled at how these erratics are slowly being broken down by natural processes and will one day flow to the sea to eventually be recreated as new rock. The multiple scales of time, breakdown, reordering and renewal became central to my work.”
Woolsey’s recent work started with drawings of trees in Japanese temple gardens. These, and subsequent drawings have been transformed into aquatints and woodcut prints, and those works have, in turn, been transformed into paintings, or cut up and reassembled in a work process that is a metaphor for the breakdown and reordering in the natural world.
He was honored with a solo exhibit at the Zillman Art Museum (University of Maine) in fall 2023 and a concurrent one-person show at the Calbeck Gallery in Rockland, which represents his work in Maine.
Bayside Arts, founded in 2016, presents programs of music, theater, film, dance and other arts each summer in July and August. For more information and a schedule visit www.BaysideArts.org.
