Painter Don Rees can?t remember a time when he didn?t paint.
“I was just born that way; I always painted,” he said.
His newest exhibit at the Sandarac Gallery in Baltimore consists of 31 landscape and still-life paintings. The exhibit, which is Rees?s first in Baltimore, is entitled “A Celebration of Form and Color.”
“I strive to give visual vitality to the landscape which has too often become a cliché,” Rees said. “My work is not a mirror image, not narrative, or sentimental, not a documentation of facts, but a celebration of paint and form.”
Richard Boss, the owner of the Sandarac Gallery, asked Rees to exhibit when he saw his work at a gallery in West Virginia.
“He is influenced by artists like Matisse and Cezanne, yet his colors are more vivid and his form is a little more sharply defined than those artists,” Boss said of Rees? work.
For the past 50 years, Rees has displayed his artwork all over the country, including the Perry House Galleries in Washington and the National Arts Club in New York City.
His painting, “White Rose” is in the permanent collection of the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown.
Since his retirement in 1989, Rees has been able to paint full-time and open his own gallery in Virginia.
“He is a truly exceptional artist who manages not to forgo form in his colorful presentation,” Boss said.
“All too often, what happens is that color takes over and the underlying form is not carefully done. But Rees is such a craftsman that he has not neglected form in order to get your attention with color.”
“[Seeing the exhibit] is like enriching your life,” Rees said. “It?s seeing the world in a different way.”
If you go
Don Rees: A Celebration of Form and Color
» Venue: Sandarac Gallery, 220 W. Read St., Baltimore
» Times: Noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday through Feb. 28
» Cost: Free
» More info: Call 410-625-9993 or visit www.sandarac gallery.com
