Jerry Weiss’s Upcoming Articles and Lecture

Harvey Dunn artist's magazine
Harvey Dunn’s Something for Supper

“The Majesty of Simple Things,” an article about Harvey Dunn by Jerry Weiss, a contributing editor to The Artist’s Magazine, will appear in its January/February issue. “[Dunn’s] favorite themes included a broad plot of land, a vast sky, and a figure or two, small in the scheme of nature but unselfconsciously dignified,” writes Weiss. “Trying to describe his work to someone who wasn’t familiar with him, the best I could do was call him a rawboned American version of Jean-Francois Millet. A better parallel is to the work of Winslow Homer, had he never seen the ocean. Symbols of a discreet heroism, Dunn’s independent figures do their farming, hunting and gathering under a big sky. Perhaps the best analogy is cinematic, for there’s a love of open space that’s reminiscent of John Ford’s westerns. His Dakota scenes were painted not en plein air, but in his suburban New Jersey studio, and are based on sketches he made during visits back west. Their authenticity resided in the artist’s memory.” Weiss has also written about Peggy Root for the issue.

On January 21, 2016, in a lecture at the Florence Griswold Museum, “Finding New Inspiration on Well-Trod Ground,” Weiss will consider the landscape of Old Lyme that has been thoroughly examined by plein-air painters over the last century and whether there’s anything fresh to be found in familiar places.

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