Bowery Gallery: Looking and Seeing (2025)
Bowery Gallery
646-230-6655, 547 West 27th St, Suite 508, New York, NY 10001
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11AM - 6PM
Opening Reception: March 27, 2025 | 6PM - 8PM
©️ Anne Delaney, Hide-out in the Woods, 24" × 36", Oil on Canvas, 2024
For this exhibition, I continued my exploration of drawing and painting the figure. This time, the figures are inspired by family members—not as portraits but as people relating to one another. They exist within landscapes or domestic interiors and focus on gestures and body language.
In my work process, I start with small pencil studies from observation or memory, then move on to larger charcoal drawings. Once a sense of direction begins to form, I start painting. As color is introduced, a new set of challenges and decisions emerge. The painting may be in a state of flux for some time.
In this group of paintings, forms and figures moved and changed in color, in scale, and in placement. Rocks shape-shift. Birds appeared. Trees created a pattern of bands of color, arrayed like a sequence of time. Figures settle into relationship with each other and their surroundings.
Sometimes, I place a figure in the foreground with its face turned away, hoping to convey that both subject and viewer are in the act of looking- attempting to make sense of what is before them.
As a painting's resolution nears, my intention is that it not be just a translation of an observation (seen or felt), but that it tells its own story with many possible endings. The painting is open and changing until that point in time when everything seems to snap into place.