Miller White at National Boston

The artists of Miller White are hosted this summer by National Boston, an award-winning, multi-media production and design company located in Brookline, Massachusetts. The curators -- Susan Danton of Miller White and Shari Sklar Jacobson of Compass Realty -- have collaborated to mount a sample of each program artist's work, alongside a solo exhibition of oil paintings in the Luminist tradition by program artist Anne Garton titled Atmosphere Abounding. Miller White's program includes William Allen, Michael Baksa, Teresa Baksa, Howard Barnes, Susan Danton, Jane Eccles, Deborah Forman, Raquel Fornasaro, Milisa Galazzi, Anne Garton, Jill Hedrick, Wayne Miller, Richard Neal, Ulla Neigenfind, Cecilia Rossey, Kathleen Sidwell, Alan Soffer, George Taylor, Ela Tom, James Wolf and Joyce Zavorskas -- a wealth of contemporary art in the abstract and figurative traditions! About Anne Garton: Working within the Luminism tradition, Anne Garton's painting style stresses the emotional force of a scene versus rendering a facade of features, underscoring the ambient components and capturing the very aura of Nature's will to express itself. Far beyond the constraints of material depictions, Garton takes the viewer to a place where the beauty of Nature is truth, and that same truth is, in fact, beauty. In her own words, she states, "I have immersed myself in this landscape for over thirty years and it has nurtured my sense of belonging. My work is a ritual. It brings me closer to the natural world with an intimacy that I otherwise could not have accessed. The Cape itself is my complete inspiration. I imagine it and sometimes I redesign it, but my work starts from this place where I live and look. I am in debt to the intimacy and comfort the Cape brings to me. Intimacy helps me tame its grandiosity. Intimacy leads me to the sublime.

Our landscape contains our own memories, and also the collective memory, which is our legacy, our inheritance. It literally gives us our sense of place, even to a large extent, our identity. We are not isolated from nature but are placed back into it through memory and art. Art attempts to deliver us our remembered past. Art strives to offer itself as a re-entry to the natural world. It invites the viewer, the reader, the listener, back to the place they have missed, where they belong.

A strong, felt landscape painting, driven by memory and emerging from direct experience can evoke powerful emotions. That is its point, its reason. If a landscape is merely decorative, it fails to touch the part of us that yearns for a place to recover our diminishing bond with nature. I practice my art out of a sense of duty, as much out of love. If I am to be a painter at this stage in my life, I must necessarily paint what I love.

I want to create a feeling of being at home in the place where I am. I do not travel to paint landscapes in which I am not intimately familiar or involved. My palette, technique, composition etc. are dictated by my home place. I believe I could not work well anywhere else.
I paint a landscape in which I am heavily invested. Travel, for me as an artist, offers the lure of history and cultural understanding, but I have no desire to represent what I am witnessing.
I cannot explain fully what it is I do with art, which is why I am painting more metaphysically than I had originally intended or had once studied for. My paintings, I believe depart from my any perceived intention and reveal instead, to my senses anyway, the spirit of my place, as it exists largely, in imagination.

For me, art is emotion minus sentiment. Nature in the raw, is my designer. It seems all I do is catalog my emotional response to what I see before me, as truthfully as I can. Nature is always on the move and I try to keep up. Seas and tides rise and fall, snow drifts wildly, mountains are there and then not there, covered in mist. Seasons come and go. Nature is always itself, menacing and benign. I try not to be sentimental. I am not seeking a golden age, where once we humans were aligned with nature perfectly. I am trying to loan nature my imagination." AG

Anne Garton studied illustration at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in the mid 60's where she was exposed to the famous Group of Seven landscape painters of the 30's and 40's. Their influence on her work is evident today, especially in her choice of the post-impressionist landscape as her subject. She has exhibited in numerous juried shows, including the prestigious Northeast show at the Cambridge Art Association, juried by Nicholas Baum, chief Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Winter Juried Show at the Duxbury Art Association, The Winter juried show at the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, The RED Biennale at the Cambridge Art Association, as well as several members' juried shows at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

A public opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, July 12th, from 5:30-8:30pm. Parking is available at the Dummer Street Garage. Viewing times for the show is in accordance with National Boston's hours of operation. Please visit them at www.nationalboston.com or call 617-734-4800 for more information.