Washington County Museum of Fine Arts' New Singer Gallery

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Yesterday I drove out to Hagerstown, MD to the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts. Their Singer Gallery (above) has recently been renovated and reinstalled. For years it had been hung in "salon style" with rows of paintings stacked close upon each other. Now there are a new floors, walls and lighting.  And it's gone the other direction to showing only a few select pieces in a more open and sweeping presentation.  I love the new look of the Gallery.

Here are a two of the pieces on display now in the new Singer Gallery.

Sewing Girl by Charles Hawthorn (Am. 1872-1930) is a personal favorite. Hawthorne does a skillful balancing act between a smokey olive green background and the sharper cool greens in the woman's blouse. In person the color relationships of these greens to the woman's hair is exquisite. Hawthorne makes all his colors seem to quietly flicker and fluctuate. Worth a trip to the Museum right there.







Also in Singer Gallery now is the Museum's impressive Courbet (French, 1819-1877) oil Landscape. 





Courbet was a master at handling his pigments, making most of his edges slightly soft and blurred, and then sharpening others crisp and distinct. Also he was a man who knew that shadows always have their own unique color personality. Look at the dark cool shadows at the left compared to the lighter and warmer shadows in all the rocks at the right.

The Museum has a glassed-in rotunda surrounding its Anna Hyatt Huntington (Am. 1876-1973) bronze Diana of the Chase.







I was delivering my oil painting Stone City Barns to the Museum. It will be one of the featured prizes in WCMFA's annual fundraiser on March 6. Tickets are available to a raffle on the Museum's website.




Upcoming:

Philip Koch Solo Exhibition at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Nov. 8, 2014 - Feb. 22, 2015.

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