Light Shines in Providence

Two Shows Exuberantly Celebrate Summer

Celebrating summer, the Providence Art Club presents two exhibitions: “Color and Light” is a solo showcase of colorful interpretations of Italian landscape by the exuberant Madolin Maxey, while “A Sense of Light” is a group exhibition featuring contemporary traditionalism and expressive-realism.

Maxey’s landscapes are explosions of feeling. They communicate what she describes as a “burst of joy” and creative energy after almost four years struggling with and recovering from serious eye surgery.

The Italian landscapes are real locations traveled by the artist. The final paintings are, to her, imaginative maps. Land, sky, and sea are presented at odd angles and distorted points-of-view, as if she’s seeing multiple directions simultaneously. In these compositions, Maxey is flying overhead and around the space as if in a childlike dreamscape of color and light.

Although she is determined not to over-intellectualize the process of composition, with the goal being to convey a highly spontaneous aesthetic, it is obvious from the trained positioning of structural elements and color choices that she controls her scenes with serious pre-planning and formal readjustment. This is an artist who fully understands where she is going. Her spaces are balanced and harmonious despite the vibrant structural and color contrasts. When asked what she does with mistakes, Maxey shrewdly replied, “there are no mistakes in life.”

In the group show “A Sense of Light,” the subjects are: waterscapes, still life and landscapes by Priscilla C. Malone; snapshots of bucolic regional forests, pastoral landscapes and coastal scenes by Jonathan Small; and unique focused underwater compositions of beautiful swimmers by Michele Poirier-Mozzone.

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