Annie Harris Massie: New Paintings in Oil and Encaustic

The final show of 2018 at Les Yeux du Monde will feature the new paintings of one of the gallery’s most admired artists, Annie Harris Massie. As this show reveals, Massie is just as comfortable painting vast natural vistas or cityscapes as she is with a single hydrangea wreath blown up exponentially. The subjects, whether animate or inanimate, are abstracted to their underlying essences, as Massie is concerned with painting the light that bathes all equally. The resulting masterful paintings in oil and encaustic seem dematerialized, fluctuating and incandescent.

Massie has a studio art degree from Hollins College and an Art History M.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work is in many important private and public collections including Richmond’s Federal Reserve Bank and Capital One, Charlottesville’s UVA Health System and Martha Jefferson Hospital, and Lynchburg’s Bank of the James. Massie’s creative talents also helped fuel the company she and her brother, William McKinnon Massie, Jr., co-founded, McKinnon and Harris, which makes fine award winning original furniture designs for the landscape.

Massie writes: "The ephemeral, transitory effects of light in the landscape are more interesting to me than tangible subject matter such as trees, fields, etc. The paintings may appear to have been created by an economy of means, but closer examination reveals that the work is the result of an editing process often with multiple layers painted in an attempt to reduce and distill subject matter to the essentials. An awareness of the materiality of paint, its weight and plasticity, is interesting to me as a counterpoint to fluctuating and ethereal light."

There will be an opening reception with the artist from 4 – 6 on Saturday, November 17 (free and open to the public). For more information, visit our website www.LYDM.co or call 434-973-5566. Gallery hours are Thursday - Sunday 1 - 5 and by appointment.