FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LANDING: NEW WORK BY ISABELLE ABBOT AT THE PAGE BOND GALLERY FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2016.
The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present Landing: New Work by Isabelle Abbot, Friday, April 1, 2016 from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition will run April 1 to April 30, 2016.
Isabelle Abbot is known for her loose, impressionistic paintings of Virginia’s mountainous countryside. Working exclusively en plein air, she uses paint as a tool for exploring and cultivating her relationship with the environment. Having spent much of her childhood on her family’s mountain property in Greenwood, Virginia, she has always felt deeply attached to the land; she turns to painting as a means to pay homage to that region, to orient herself within her surroundings, and to “understand the moment when a location becomes significant and takes up residence in our memories.” For Abbot, her work is less about depicting picturesque scenes than embodying the “experience of Place.” The artist writes, “I am a painter of a very specific region and I want my viewers to feel instinctively where these paintings come from.” With quick, broad strokes and a vibrant color palette, she strives to capture the essentials of the landscape: the lights, textures, and colors that surround her, the topography, the time of day and the changing seasons—these are the signifiers that make a particular moment in a particular environment meaningful. Abbot’s paintings of undulating hayfields and hazy Blue Ridge Mountains celebrate these ephemeral details, at once triggering a sense of familiarity and indistinct memory, and arousing a sense of attuned presence in nature.
Abbot received her BA in 2005 from the University of Virginia, where she studied under local painters Richard Crozier and Philip Geiger, and her MFA in 2011 from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has shown her work in several galleries across both states and lectured at the University of Virginia and Bridgewater College. She currently resides in Charlottesville and is a member of the McGuffey Arts Center.
