The visage of a bucolic, pastoral landscape has for centuries been a tonic, a respite from the chaotic, accelerated ills of the world.  Artists and writers, musicians and actors and dancers, sought and still seek an escape from the pressures of everyday life by seeking safe harbor - from the industrial age to the present.  Gauguin fled high society Paris for the primitive islands of Tahiti;  Georgia O'Keefe left the hustle and bustle of NYC for the balm and solitude of the New Mexican desert. As did D.H. Lawrence, who famously stated "The soul of man is a dark, vast forest". 

George Inness, affiliated early on with the Hudson River School, and often considered the father of American (spiritual) landscape painting, inspired this particular curator with his supernaturally ethereal "In the Gloaming", painted in 1893, in the collection of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in NH.  Samuel Palmer perhaps best exemplifies the visionary pastoral genre, and we've included an exquisite small etching in the exhibition, ca.1850, of a shepherd herding his small herd of cows along a lush, forested hillside.  

In today's exceptionally troubled, turbulent times, more than ever artists and art viewers seek solace and inner peace through creation and creativity.  The pastoral landscape as an escape - literal, (Thomas A.D. Watson, Polly Shindler, Thomas Hoffmann, Brandon Johnson) abstracted, (Becky Yazdan, Irene Lipton, Paul Campbell, Joe Diggs) or something in-between (Nanno De Groot, Aaron Brodeur, Benjamin King, Peter Hutchinson) - is on the forefront of our unconscious. Not to mention the everyday challenge of survival and paying the bills. Our DNA residency, now in its fourteenth season, situated in the heart of the National Seashore (one of the largest protected coastal conservation lands in the country), provides a temporary one or two week respite from the pressures of everyday existence. Ultimately, artists and viewers have to seek "refuge and redemption", not only from the landscape, from the work itself. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 

-William Butler Yeats The Second Coming, 1919.

Typical of all our group shows at Readymade, we've included a mix of Cape-based artists, and artists from NYC, Boston and points beyond, many of whom attended the DNA Residency now or in the past.  The interpretations of pastoral are wide ranging: abstract, surreal, literal, expansive and personal, and above all beautiful.  The roster for "Pastoral" includes the following 25 participants:

Aaron Brodeur

Walter Brown 

Paul Campbell 

Lucy Clark 

Nanno De Groot 

Joe Diggs 

Sarah Dineen

Ava Federov 

Jai Hart 

Thomas Hoffmann

Peter Hutchinson 

Brandon Johnson

Benjamin King

Ryan Kish 

Irene Lipton 

John Lutz 

Samuel Palmer

Mark Redden

Jen Shepard

Polly Shindler 

Whiting Tennis

Thomas A.D. Watson

Robert Scott Whipkey

Bert Yarborough 

Becky Yazdan

- Nick Lawrence

Curator and Director

Readymade Gallery 

11 Cove Rd

Orleans MA 02653

www.Readymadegallery.com

The exhibition opens Saturday, August 2nd, with previews on Orleans' First Friday August 1st, and runs through Wednesday, October 1st.  

Hours are Wed-Sunday 11am-6pm or by appointment.