Contact:
Dan Carpenter
(325) 673-4587
Marketing@thegracemuseum.org

Native Abilenian to exhibit paintings at The Grace

Abilene, TX (April 18, 2007) - Artist Randy Bacon is having a homecoming, of sorts, beginning April 28 at The Grace Museum

.

Bacon, a native Abilenian, recently completed his master's degree at Texas Christian University , and the artwork from that degree program, along with several other of Bacon's paintings, will be on display in The Grace's second floor Gallery A. The show is titled Randy Bacon: A Sense of Place.

"I have always been attracted to the quality of light, the precise colors and the big skies of my native Texas," said Bacon. "In communicating a sense of place, my representational oil landscapes often have a narrative, cinematic feel. I draw upon the people and venues of my life to bring about work where past, present and future become blended, where memory and reality connect. In the vastness of the West Texas landscape, I look for situations that reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary. This land often appears to be caught in a time warp and I try to capture the quiet timelessness of its isolation."

" Bacon's oil paintings take us to familiar places and in the process remind us what it felt like to be there," said Judy Deaton, Curator of Art & Exhibits at The Grace. "Bacon's carefully staged scenes combine time-warped evidence of past prosperity and a keen sense of the present moment. By using photography as a major compositional tool, Bacon dramatizes the precise feeling of the place depicted."

In preparation for his panoramic paintings, Bacon sequentially orders his photographs, lining them up edge to edge. The alignment of photographs subtly distorts reality by bending otherwise straight lines and flattening spatial relationships. He accentuates certain visual elements, such as the quintessentially radiant Texas sunlight of daybreak and dusk, enriching the red dirt with glowing color. The horizontal emphasis of the panoramic paintings recalls the vast flat horizon that dominates West Texas . Bacon enhances his photographic documentary with personal subjective memory of how it felt to be in that particular place.

"Bacon reveals the quiet, yet stunning, beauty of what we might otherwise pass by too quickly," added Deaton. "He plots the intermediary points along a journey, the places we unthinkingly sweep through on the way to more alluring sites. As Bacon reminds us with his emotionally poignant paintings, oftentimes the journey is more important - and more intriguing - than the destination."

Randy Bacon: A Sense of Place opens April 28 and will be on exhibit in The Grace's second floor Gallery A through September 20.

A special members-only reception will be held April 27 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Museum.

The Grace Museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; and from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every Thursday. Admission is free Thursday evening after 5 p.m.

For more information, call 325-673-4587.

###